Rent-control laws limiting the rents private landlords can charge tenants are controversial in the United States. Critics have condemned rent control’s mandated wealth transfer from landlords to tenants, and economists have decried its negative effects on rental supply and quality. With the advent of the sharing economy, rent-controlled tenants can rent out their below-market units for short durations at market-level or premium prices, a practice I term “rent control sharing.” The reaction to (...) rent-controlled tenants pocketing money from Airbnb and other homesharing sites at the expense of their hapless landlords has been negative. Yet, the sharing economy has not changed an essential feature of rent control: the redistribution of wealth from landlord to tenant. Instead, Airbnb and similar platforms have altered the form of the redistribution and the legal relations between landlord and tenant, and increased the salience of the wealth transfer from landlord to tenant. As a result, rent control sharing collides with public preferences for in-kind redistribution and stronger legal protections for property used personally or intimately. This Article explores how rent control sharing accentuates some of the flaws of rent control and fuels the debate over rent control’s future. (shrink)

Residential rent control is a contentious issue in many jurisdictions throughout the world. While tenant groups have often argued vociferously in defence of control, landlord groups and the vast majority of economists have been equally vehement in their criticisms. This paper examines some key normative issues involved in rent control. In particular I examine arguments in favor of control based on the alleged unfairness of winfall profits, upon affordability, and finally on the creation of (...) rights to security of tenure. Various objections by libertarian and free market philosophers and economists are examined. I conclude with a somewhat limited defense of rent control as used in specific situations as part of a more comprehensive policy to satisfy the normative demands at the root of tenant pressure for rent control. (shrink)

Rent control is an economic abomination. It diverts investments away from residential rent units, it leads to their deterioration, it is responsible for urban decay such as in the South Bronx, it does not help poor tenants, it is a horrendous means of income redistribution. Yet this economic regulation is beloved of intellectuals (hot beds of pro rent control sentiment are Berkeley, Ann Arbor and Cambridge) particularly in the legal and philosophical communities. The present article (...) is dedicated to an exploration and rejection of the arguments in behalf of rent control which emanate from this source. (shrink)

Agribusiness corporations primarily involved in providing livestock feed—colloquially known as the “ABCD” (Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Bunge, Cargill, and the Louis Dreyfus Company)—have begun to enter the fishing industry around the world. I argue that this recent entry of agribusiness multinationals in aquaculture, focusing particularly on Cargill, arises to take advantage of strategic opportunities to proliferate, or create links with respect to feed production and development within value chains. Concerning such opportunities, as I document, Cargill first leveraged its access to (...) cheap, overproduced grains in the 1990s, developing ways to insert corn and soy into what it calls “aquafeed.” Next, the multinational firm began proliferating links within fishing industry value chains in the form of introducing new technical assistance services, as well as creating feed supplements and additives. As I explain, these efforts to proliferate links in the supply chain exist as opportunities to charge rents, or surplus profits, which is possible because Cargill retains the right to control the new products and services. An additional link in the chain includes how the corporation has expanded its role in the global food system from its past as an intermediary, to engaging consumers in direct ways by attempting to create their preferences. I conduct my analysis of Cargill’s corporate strategy by focusing on reporting from the fishing industry publication, Aquafeed News, detailing developments from 2000 through 2023. (shrink)

El correcto mantenimiento de las zonas donde se alojan los perros y el uso de repelentes es fundamental para la prevención de la transmisión de esta enfermedad.

Contemporary, technoscientific capitalism is characterized by the configuration of a range of “things” as assets or capitalized property. Accumulation strategies have changed as a result of this assetization process. Rather than entrepreneurial strategies based on commodity production, technoscientific capitalism is increasingly underpinned by rentiership or the appropriation of value through ownership and control rights, monopoly conditions, and regulatory or market devices and practices. While rentiership is often presented as a negative phenomenon in both neoclassical and Marxist political economy literatures—and (...) much in between—in this paper, I conceptualize rentiership as a technoeconomic practice and process framed by insights from science and technology studies. So, rather than a problematic “side effect” of capitalism, the concept of rentiership enables us to understand how different forms of value extraction constitute, and are constituted by, different forms of technoscience. This allows STS to contribute a distinctive analytical approach to ongoing debates in political economy about economic rents and rent-seeking. (shrink)

Over 200 lawsuits were filed against the Hertz rental car company by former customers who were arrested as a result of the company’s poor inventory control system and its implementation of two business practices which led to the filing of unsubstantiated stolen car reports with police. According to a whistleblower, these practices essentially meant Hertz was using police “as a repo company and the court system as a collection company” (News Nation 2022, 4:24). Consequences to the individuals who were (...) falsely charged with theft included financial hardship, job loss, reputational damage, child custody problems, the trauma of arrest sometimes at gunpoint, and the traumatic experience of being jailed. This case study calls for students to analyze the company’s actions from the perspectives of ethical theories and decision making, as well as corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

The manuscripts of Cicero's De oratore divide into two families: mutili and integri. The oldest representatives of the mutilated family are Avranches 238 , Erlangen 380 , and London, Harley 2736 . A and H are independent of each other, and the best witnesses to the text of the lost archetype . E too is considered to be an independent witness. Since the work of E. Ströbel, dating from the early eighties of the last century, the view has been generally (...) held that E, though closely related to A, is not a descendant of it but a copy of a ‘gemellus’ of A. The stemma devised by Ströbel has remained essentially the same to the present day. (shrink)

Reducing health disparities and improving health outcomes are fundamental principles in global health. Environmental justice remains underrecognized and undervalued as a key driver of health dispar...

a houseis a structure that provides shelter for humanity. Studies have shown that in most parts of the world, urban rents are determined by various factors. These factors include location, level of facilities and services, neighborhood characteristics, space etcetera. Among these factors, the most influencing factor of rent in Wa Municipality is the level of facilities and services provided for tenant use. The objectives of this research was to examine the cost of housing construction, to determine the role played (...) by government in housing provision, recommend policies for housing provision, determine the portion of household income spent on rent. The methodology of this research is base on interplay of deskwork and fieldwork and these took the form of data collection, presentation and data analysis of findings. In the course of this study, both qualitative and quantitative primary and secondary data were collected. A summary of the findings from the research indicates that: cost of building materials is the major contributory factor to the cost of construction aside land and labour cost, the existing rent control law as currently operated have little or no impact on rent charged in the Municipality, current rent levels in the municipality are deemed to be satisfactory, besides the already documented rent determinants, population, occupation, and prospective duration of lease were also identified. One other major finding was that landlords do not take into account the room v let but take into consideration the number of people occupying the room to charge their rent and as such tenants who cannot afford to pay the full recoverable rent has to search for tenants they don‟t know. The group recommends that, There should be given a high priority to local building materials, which could reduce the cost of building and the improvement of the supply chain of various building materials; there should be a mechanism that would ensure that the Rent Control Board, the house owners and tenants would be provided with a platform where consensus building can be done in order to ensure transparency in rent charge Finally, the government should also urge the exemption of value added taxes on building components sourced locally as well as import duties on imported goods. (shrink)

Economists evaluate their models in terms of credibility. For example, Rothschild and Stiglitz argued from a model of a completive insurance market that under the “plausible” (632) assumption of information asymmetry, one can “credibly” infer the non-existence of equilibria in specific situations – despite the fact that, as they admit, the real ‘market … for insurance is probably not competitive’ (648).1 Another example is Richard Thaler’s column on anomalies of (micro-) economic theory. From 1987 to 2001, he headed every article (...) with the following sentence: ‘An empirical result is anomalous if it is difficult to rationalize, or if implausible assumptions are necessary to explain it within the paradigm’.2 Or, yet another example, Hans Lind concludes in a survey of mathematical models of rent control that ‘what is shown in the model[s]…is just one type of argument…for why a certain story is more credible than a competing story. (shrink)

Executive summary In this discussion paper, it is shown that the current housing affordability crisis in Germany is a problem of intergenerational injustice since it affects young Germans disproportionately negatively. To address these injustices, the following policy measures are suggested. 1. Policies to assure affordable rents a. Rent controls : Well-designed rent controls help keep rentprice increases in re-lettings in check, while still allowing landlords to pass renovation costs on to their renters and to increase their rents by (...) a small percentage annually. This would especially benefit young individuals, since the young move more often than baby boomers and are therefore disproportionately negatively affected by price increases in re-lettings. b. Strengthening social housing : Local, state, and national governments must invest in the provision of social housing to provide below-market-priced housing for the most vulnerable households. This measure is especially important in large cities, where rents have risen steeply over the past decade, threatening to displace many poor households. 2. Measures to facilitate first-time homeownership for young Germans. Supporting young adults in becoming first-time homeowners is another important area in which public policy can help mitigate the negative effects of the housing crisis for young Germans. This can be achieved via: a. First-time home buyer programmes : First-time home buyer programmes support individuals who are buying their first home through grants or other financial stimuli, such as a first-time home buyer tax credit. Several countries, such as Australia or Canada, already have such programmes in place, helping young individuals to become homeowners. Such measures could also be adopted in Germany. b. Access to credit for first-time buyers : Young people often face credit constraints when buying their first home since they do not yet own a home they could use as collateral. Governmental programmes, such as the first-time homebuyers plan in Canada, can help young individuals to obtain resources for the down payment on a mortgage, thereby improving their chances to be able to obtain a mortgage at a reasonable interest rate. 3. Measures to increase housing supply. To address issues of housing affordability and intergenerational justice, public policy should aim to increase the housing stock. It should also provide for the needs of young generations, especially in urban areas. Concrete measures to achieve these goals include: a. Densification policies : Densification policies consist of relaxing zoning restrictions. This allows landowners to build more densely and taller, thereby increasing the overall housing supply. Relaxing zoning restrictions allows the housing supply to respond to an increased demand and can therefore prevent house prices from rising. Therefore, densification policies have become a widespread tool to address housing unaffordability and could be used more extensively in German cities. b. Using existing housing stock more efficiently : Another factor that hinders young people from finding adequate homes is that houses that could be occupied by a young family or multiple students are often occupied by an old couple or individual who continue living in the homes where they raised their children, even after the children have moved out. Online platforms, such as Tauschbörse, that connect young individuals currently living in a smaller property with older people currently living in a larger property can help in using the existing housing stock more efficiently. Since the current German housing crisis is a predominantly urban phenomenon, Germany’s large cities should be the primary focus of these policies. Yet, because of architectural and socio-economic differences between and within cities, there exists no one-sizefits-all solution. Nevertheless, the above measures can serve as a starting point for developing comprehensive measures to fight intergenerational injustice in the German housing market. (shrink)

The article analyzes the problem of Ukraine's development since independence. A comparison of the way of organizing social reality in modern Ukraine and in the Soviet period is carried out. The main regulatory factor in the life of Soviet society was the principle of domination. Ukraine has inherited the principle of domination and retains its leading role in the current social order. Its various manifestations that determine the structure of Ukrainian society, in particular the growth of the bureaucratic class and (...) bureaucratic pressure on all spheres and sections of life, are analyzed. The dominance of bureaucracy contains latent violence, feeds corruption and minimizes social dynamics. It is also a phenomenon of power rent, which finds its expression in a kind of "privatization of the state." Another universal effect of the principle of domination is the doubling of social reality into apparent and hidden. The apparent reality becomes a space for the existence of ordinary citizens and the implementation of legal procedures, while the hidden one contains a system of real circulation of power, which is not regulated by any legal regulations, instead, controls all movements of the social body. The systemic role in the hidden society is played by cliques — informal groups of influential people who really control the course of events. The con- sequence of the principle of domination is the passivity and marginalization of the Ukrainian citizen, associated with the defect of political participation. Such non-participation in power is embodied in such forms of consciousness as hope, liking, and despair. Today, independence is not a given, but a chance that must be realized. The way to this is through the restoration of the role of the people as a sovereign power and the development of non-dominant regulatory factors of sociality. (shrink)

Each year thousands of individuals enrol in clinical trials as healthy volunteers to earn money. Some of them pursue research participation as a full-time or at least a part-time job. They call themselves professional or semiprofessional guinea pigs. The practice of paying healthy volunteers raises numerous ethical concerns. Different payment models have been discussed in literature. Dickert and Grady argue for a wage-payment model. This model gives research subjects a standardised hourly wage, and it is based on an assumption that (...) research participation is morally indistinguishable from other forms of unskilled labour. In this paper, I will challenge this assumption. I will argue that human guinea pigging has particular characteristics which taken together make it significantly different from other forms of labour. Participation in research is skill-independent. Healthy volunteers are valuable not because they are skilful persons, but because they are human bodies. The role of research volunteers is mainly passive. They are not asked to produce goods or deliver services. They are paid for enduring unpleasant, painful and risky interventions performed by investigators. Research volunteering involves inherent risks and uncertainties, and subjects have little or no control over their minimisation and materialisation. I conclude that participation in clinical research is a specific kind of activity. It is more like renting out one’s body to strangers, than working. Thus, research participation should not be treated on par with other forms of employment. (shrink)

Does anyone have a monopoly on God? Can religion be bought or sold? Why do we pay priests? How do we limit religious conflicts? And should states get involved in matters of faith? "Faithonomics" shows that religion should be analyzed as a market similar to those for other goods and services, like bottled water or haircuts. It is about religion today, but Brekke shows us that there have always been religious markets, all over the world, regulated to a greater or (...) lesser degree. He argues that state "control" over religious markets is often the cause of unforeseen and negative consequences. Many of today's problems like religious terrorism or rent-seeking by religious political parties, are easier to understand if we think like economists. Religious markets work best when they are relatively free, and religious organizations should be left to sell their products without unnecessary restrictions. We have no good reason to grant any one of them special privileges, political or financial."--book jacket front flap. (shrink)

This essay investigates a strand of left-republicanism that emerged in France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The solidarists developed a distinctive theory of social property and a thorough critique of the liberal, republican, and socialist alternatives. Solidarism rests on the claim that the modern division of labor creates a social product that does not naturally belong to the individuals who control it as their private property; property, therefore, should be conceived as “common wealth,” divided into individual (...) and public shares. When the wealthy appropriate a disproportionate share, they have a quasi-contractual debt to society that they are obliged to repay. The concepts of social debt, common-wealth, reparations, and rent played an important role in legitimizing egalitarian policies, but they have been largely forgotten today. This article resuscitates the theoretical arguments introduced by the solidarists and explains their relevance for contemporary debates about alternative economic arrangements. (shrink)

What makes a multimillion-dollar, transnational intimate industry possible when most people see it as exploitative? Using the newly emergent case of commercial surrogacy in India, this article extends the literature on stratified reproduction and intimate industries by examining how surrogacy persists and thrives despite its common portrayal as the “rent-a-womb industry” and “baby factory.” Using interview data with eight infertility specialists, 20 intended parents, and 70 Indian surrogate mothers, as well as blogs and media stories, we demonstrate how market (...) actors justify their pursuits through narrating moral frames of compassion and altruism that are not incidental but systematic to and constitutive of transnational surrogacy. We observed two predominant moral frames: surrogacy liberates and empowers Indian women from patriarchal control; and surrogacy furthers reproductive rights. Within these frames, the market exchange of money for babies is cast as compassion, which allows commissioning clients to sidestep accusations of racism, classism, and sexism. Yet, we reveal that the ability to navigate around these threats relies on racist, classist, and sexist tropes about Third World working-class women. Further, we find that surrogate mothers did not experience significant changes in economic status after surrogacy. (shrink)

While much has been written on specificity (e.g., in texts on new institutional economics, agency theory, and team production theory), there are still some insights to be learnt by business ethicists. This article approaches the issue from the perspective of team production, and will propose a new form of corporate governance: enlightened corporate governance, which takes into consideration the specific investments of employees. The article argues that, in addition to shareholders, employees also bear a residual risk which arises due to (...) their specific investments. This residual risk presents a valid and legitimate basis for residual claims. In this way, employees can be seen as residual claimants due to the fact that their income depends upon a hazardous quasi rent. Therefore, this article will call on the fiduciary duty of board members to protect those employees who are exposed to such residual risks and may thus be vulnerable as a result. This leads to a fundamental change of perspective on the “theory of the firm” – a change which will adopt the theories of new institutional economics, agency theory, and team production theory in order to promote business ethics research. Against this background, enlightened corporate governance aims to follow the criterion of specific investments as a legitimate basis for residual claims. Furthermore, it seeks to understand the consequences for board members, and to promote the sharing of control and ownership. The article will close with some discussion of the implications and future prospects for business ethics. (shrink)

This article draws on key models of monitoring and blockholding articulated in the incomplete contracts theory of the firm. Under incomplete contracts theory, different governance systems have incentive structures that entail different tradeoffs—tradeoffs between ownership concentration and liquidity, between monitoring and management initiative, and between private rent-seeking and activity benefiting shareholders as a group. The tradeoffs delimit opportunities for productive cross-reference. More specifically, blockholder systems, such as those in Europe, subsidize monitoring by permitting blockholders to reap private benefits of (...) control through self-dealing and insider trading. Market systems, such as those in the United States and Britain, regulate such private rent-seeking toward the end of maintaining an institutional framework that supports diffuse share ownership and liquid trading markets. It follows that a legal framework conducive to blockholding may be ill-equipped to foster dispersed equity ownership and thick trading markets and that a legal framework conducive to liquid trading markets may have properties that discourage blockholding. This gives rise to questions for law reform agendas on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, proponents ask for deregulation of controls on institutional investors, looking to encourage blockholding and more effective monitoring. In Europe, proponents ask for stronger securities regulation, looking to encourage deeper trading markets. This article suggests that each reform program may lead to disappointing results because neither assures conforming adjustments to the pertinent actors’ incentives. Alternatively, strict reforms that materially change prevailing incentive patterns could perversely destabilize workable arrangements without assuring the appearance of more effective alternatives. (shrink)

The paper provides an economic interpretation of legal culture. Drawing on analogies from other products and services markets, I argue that combinations of legal language, procedures and conceptual structures constitute a network which, mainly through cost considerations, come to occupy a dominant position in particular jurisdictions. The facts that a particular legal culture will be adopted by political rulers and that practising lawyers can both control entry to the profession and ‘capture’ law‐making processes suggest that legal culture networks may (...) be protected against competition. To the extent that they have monopolistic power, lawyers can exploit the key features of legal culture to extract rents: the law used can be more formalistic, more complex and more technical than is optimal. Whether the monopolistic power of a particular legal culture is sustainable depends on the relative strength of potential competitive forces. These can take the form of alternative cultures becoming available for particular branches of the law, thus partially dismantling the network, or through transfrontier transactions opening up the network to competition from foreign systems. (shrink)

In Aeschylus' "Supplices" the Danaids flee their cousins and take refuge at Argos. Scholars have noted similarities between the Argos of the play and contemporary Athens. Yet one such correspondence has generally been overlooked: the Danaids are awarded sanctuary in terms reflecting mid fifth-century Athenian μετοιϰία, a process providing for the partial incorporation of non-citizens into polis life. Danaus and his daughters are of Argive ancestry and take up residence within the city, yet do not become citizens. Instead, they receive (...) the right μετοιϰεῖν τῆσδε γῆς . As metics they retain control of their person and property, and are not liable to seizure by another. They are not permitted to own immovable property , but receive rent-free lodgings. Pelasgus and the other Argive citizens serve as their citizen representative . Casting the Danaids as metics highlights the similarities between Pelasgus and his predecessor, Apis. Both leaders were confronted by violent strangers demanding to live among the Argives, and sought to protect the autochthony and territory of Argos. Yet as suppliants the Danaids cannot be forcibly expelled. Pelasgus' solution is a grant of μετοιϰία approved by the Argive assembly. The emergence of μετοιϰία as a formal status at Athens is difficult to date. Most scholars place it between the reforms of Cleisthenes and Pericles' citizenship law . The "Supplices" provides evidence for a date in the 460s, and functions as a charter myth legitimizing μετοιϰία, much the way the Eumenides does for the Areopagus. The "Supplices" also fits well within the context of immigration and urban development leading to Pericles' law. The fact that the Danaid trilogy won first prize may be due to the Athenians' empathy for Argos as a risk-taking polis committed both to defending its identity and to acknowledging divinely sanctioned claims to refuge. (shrink)

In Aeschylus' "Supplices" the Danaids flee their cousins and take refuge at Argos. Scholars have noted similarities between the Argos of the play and contemporary Athens. Yet one such correspondence has generally been overlooked: the Danaids are awarded sanctuary in terms reflecting mid fifth-century Athenian μετοιϰία, a process providing for the partial incorporation of non-citizens into polis life. Danaus and his daughters are of Argive ancestry and take up residence within the city, yet do not become citizens. Instead, they receive (...) the right μετοιϰεῖν τῆσδε γῆς. As metics they retain control of their person and property, and are not liable to seizure by another. They are not permitted to own immovable property, but receive rent-free lodgings. Pelasgus and the other Argive citizens serve as their citizen representative. Casting the Danaids as metics highlights the similarities between Pelasgus and his predecessor, Apis. Both leaders were confronted by violent strangers demanding to live among the Argives, and sought to protect the autochthony and territory of Argos. Yet as suppliants the Danaids cannot be forcibly expelled. Pelasgus' solution is a grant of μετοιϰία approved by the Argive assembly. The emergence of μετοιϰία as a formal status at Athens is difficult to date. Most scholars place it between the reforms of Cleisthenes and Pericles' citizenship law. The "Supplices" provides evidence for a date in the 460s, and functions as a charter myth legitimizing μετοιϰία, much the way the Eumenides does for the Areopagus. The "Supplices" also fits well within the context of immigration and urban development leading to Pericles' law. The fact that the Danaid trilogy won first prize may be due to the Athenians' empathy for Argos as a risk-taking polis committed both to defending its identity and to acknowledging divinely sanctioned claims to refuge. (shrink)

Since 2008 I have been closely following the conceptual/performance/video work of Daniel Peltz. Gently rendered through media installation, ethnographic, and performance strategies, Peltz’s work reverently and warmly engages the inner workings of social systems, leaving elegant rips and tears in any given socio/cultural quilt. He engages readymades (of social and media constructions) and uses what are identified as interruptionist/interventionist strategies to disrupt parts of an existing social system, thus allowing for something other to emerge. Like the stereoscope that requires two (...) identical images to create an illusion of a three-dimensional image, Peltz sometimes visualizes two separate elements to create an object or moment that requires space and depth to focus on its varied layers. They say your brain has to process and make meaningful sense out of all that visual information before it can accept the illusion. I say your brain has to do a similar thing when looking and seeing the divine, magical, and faithful (social) art making of Daniel Peltz. Daniel Peltz is Associate Professor of Film/Animation/Video at RISD. He divides his time between Rhode Island and Sweden and is currently at work on an exhibition at Botkyrka Konsthall, Stockholm opening February 2013 and a new project to be included in the IASKA: Spaced Biennial (Australia) in 2014. This interview took place on Skype and is part one of a two-part interview. Feliz Lucia Molina: Are you in Providence, RI? Daniel Peltz: I’m at my house in Providence. I’ve been back for six days teaching winter session at RISD and doing this workshop series—these investors’ drum circles with a group of wealth managers. a client of the firm, 2013, photo Shirin Adhami FLM: The wealth managers were all drumming together? DP: They were all drumming in response to the performance of their retirement portfolios. FLM: Is this part of the “Unrealized Gain/Loss” piece? DP: Yes, it’s part of a show I’m working on in Sweden. I can show you because it was just today. I’ll show you some of this. Lets see—share screen [click, click, click]. This is the room. I’ve been using the camera system that’s already installed in the conference rooms to record them. So the video is being recorded directly by the wealth management office’s tech staff. These are the people I worked with in the last workshop. This conference table is less wondrous. They’ve been learning to drum in response to their retirement portfolios. I started by bringing in my little bit of wealth for them to propose a management strategy, I came to the follow-up meeting with a counter proposal, which was this workshop. So they agreed to do this series of workshops instead of managing my wealth. FLM: Does everybody in the room manage your wealth? That’s kind of a lot of people. DP: That woman in the back there and Craig —they handle new client business. So when you come there with your wealth, they sit down with you and suggest to you how they would manage it. They’re very nice, responsible people. FLM: And where is this? DP: This is in Providence and the one I was showing you is in Waltham, where I was today. Then I’m going to Newport for the last one on Friday. So I will have done four of them. This is the group in Waltham that I just played with today. I played directly with the two groups in Providence and I’m working with an ethnomusicologist at Brown, Asha Tamarisa, who is facilitating the last two. She’s helped develop the workshop in terms of figuring out how to train a group to do this and thinking about the compositional challenges of working in response to retirement portfolio data. FLM: Screensharing helps me to figure out tiny bits here and there about the project. DP: I might even be able to play you a little of the audio I’ve also been working with a group of professional percussionists on what will become a quarterly public investors’ drum circle event. Their stuff was really nice, but I want you to hear what we sounded like in the workshops. They’ve all been recorded by the a/v system in the offices. We use a simple structure where the drummer investors interpret the sensation of gain or loss as embellishments to a base heartbeat rhythm. The group holds the heartbeat and, as each person experiences gain or loss, they embellish that rhythm. "Screensharing helps me to figure out tiny bits here and there about the project" FLM: Is the process all very spontaneous? DP: Its actually quite structured. We produce a custom stock ticker that shows the performance of their collective portfolios. In advance of the workshop each participant submits assets in their retirement portfolio. Then we make a stock ticker that shows the real-time performance of their assets so that they can respond to almost live data. FLM: Are they reading the stock ticker projected up on the screen in the room? Do people drum in correspondence to the visual live data of the performance of their assets? DP: Exactly. They’re looking at the stock ticker as opposed to each other, so it’s a slightly shifted drum circle. They’re looking at the ticker but they’re listening to each other—that’s what we’re practicing. For example, NVO—the price is 172.08 but it’s down -1.16 and as that moves across the screen, the person who’s retirement is invested in that asset starts to embellish when that arrow first appears, based on their experience of loss. They stop when it exits the screen and return to the heartbeat. You could have one ticker for each retirement portfolio, but the way the workshop is constructed is that we just isolate one asset from each person’s portfolio so that everyone in the group is represented in a single ticker. So they’re drumming and looking at the ticker, but they’re hearing each other experience gain and loss. We’ve removed direct visual engagement from the social structure of a drum circle but the oral engagement is still there. FLM: So they had their own sound interpretation of gain and loss? DP: Yeah and that part is quite spontaneous as you were saying. In some of the preparatory exercises we’ve been working to give the participants more strategies for interpreting the sensations of gain and loss. We’re trying to develop their capacity to embellish a heartbeat or base rhythm but I’m not invested in having a melodious result. I’m quite curious about what this kind of structure will result in without any desire for a particular result. FLM: For context, can you talk about the project you did a couple years ago in Bali, “Unrealized Gain/Loss” in relation to this current wealth management project? DP: The workshops I’ve been doing use a similar strategy to the other components in this project. It started in Indonesia on my sabbatical and I was really trying to understand where I was physically and where I was being on sabbatical—this kind of strange jubilee structure where every seventh year you’re supposed to renew your self. And it was around the time of the global financial crisis. I was on sabbatical for the global financial crisis. I remember watching my father, in particular, respond to the financial crisis by monitoring his retirement portfolio and trying to make sense of it. I realized on a visit to their home that he checked his retirement portfolio every single day and I was really struck by that because in some way our parents are mysteries to us as children, especially their moods. We know how important their moods are but we don’t know what governs them. And somehow it was like I’d figured it out, it’s the performance of the DOW! So I think there was something in that. Then I was in Indonesia and I had been drawn there by an interest in their highly ritualized Hindu culture, where so much of life is driven by a ceremonial calendar. I was interested in Bali as this predominantly Hindu pocket within a predominantly Islamic country and life there being organized by this ritual calendar functioning as a kind of resistance to the dominant global religion of free-market capitalism. So I started to explore that correlation between the ways in which this culture that I was living in was sort of “living for the afterlife” and this idea within certain segments of American society of “living for the afterwork life”. The idea that your wellbeing in the “afterwork life” is tied to forces that are unseen and largely beyond your control has strong similarities to many religious understandings of the universe. So I started to explore that and the crafts and materials that were around me were primarily Batik and percussion. Percussion is a huge part of daily life in Bali. These gamelan troupes were everywhere. And I also happened to be there for Nyepi, the day of silence, which is preceded by a very elaborate procession and construction of demonic statues. These were the things that were around me and I started studying Batik with one of the Batik artists there and also started a conversation with two master Batik artists, one who is American and her Indonesian husband. I developed these patterns that were based on symbols from the performance of my retirement portfolio and worked with the batik artists to produce two sarongs. d. peltz - 2012 In producing the designs, I treated the performance of my retirement portfolio since my arrival at RISD [7 years] as a significant interval and then I looked at the ways in which decisions are made within retirement portfolios as having an extension outwards from the individual assets that underlie the retirement portfolio, which are kind of like the base elements of the retirement world. Then there’s the allocation of your assets, which is a global way of understanding an individual according to typologies, which are often referred to in terms of risk—this notion of a ‘risk profile’. What type of ‘person’ you are is determined by your attitude towards risk, or potentiality, and I found that to be a really fascinating way of understanding the universe. I remember looking at the tabs in my retirement portfolio and finding this one for viewing ‘Unrealized Gain/Loss’ and that’s often how I work—is just going through the Cambridge Parking Code, for example, and finding this section of the code that was called ‘Crossing Non-Signalized Locations’ and just feeling “I can’t do any better than that,” you know? That’s what I was talking about in terms of ready-mades that exist in the social sphere. So I found that tab, actually, a long time ago, and I pulled it out of a journal when I was there [in Bali] working on these pieces and I wound up making these two sarongs and later on a series of porcelain vessels for holding one’s unrealized gains and losses. At the time, I knew that I wanted a performance to come out of them, but I wasn’t sure what it was. I was inspired very much by this sort of thing: Pulls out a TIAA-CREF brochure with a man in a suit seated at a table. This guy is probably an actor, and [the brochure] says “TIAA-Cref announces “Individual counseling sessions at the Rhode Island School of Design. Individual counseling sessions at no additional cost to you. You can discuss your personal financial situation with an experienced TIAA consultant on a confidential basis. We are available to help you discuss how to achieve your financial goals by investing in financial solutions such as mutual funds, brokerage, life insurance, and annuities...etc....What retirement benefits best fits your situation?” Often I encounter this and I think O.K., this is one way to prepare for the after-work life and it seems inadequate to me. But, I also find it really inspiring. I really like the visual language of it. I kind of want to be that man. I’d like to see if I could maybe buy his clothes. FLM: What it is about the man on the brochure that interests you? DP: He’s offering personalized objective advice and a detailed evaluation of everything you need to know and do. Who wouldn’t want that? But he’s also something of a contemporary priest or priestess, mediating between the unseen all-powerful universe of global capitalism and the common worker. So I started off developing Unrealized Gain/Loss directly from the charts that represent the performance of my retirement portfolio. Then I came home and I wanted to use those. I had this word in my journal “unrealized gain/loss vessel.” I had this notion of vessels that would contain unrealized gains and losses. That felt really important to me that they would have somewhere to go. I had been thinking a lot about altars and making offerings—that somehow this really fickle, massive, difficult-to-comprehend-universe of the financial world—that somehow it might be nice if you could making an offering to it. [In Bali] they made such beautiful elaborate offerings. So I studied offering making as well with one of the women there and she taught me some of the standard forms created by folding leaves and the significance of the floral arrangements. I started working in clay and then moved to porcelain and I made these unrealized gain/loss vessels. I made a few of them, they have holes on either side that you can’t get your fingers in. But something can go in there and something can go out of there. It’s a nice size for putting on an altar. Then I got this commission from Artists in Context who was interested in my doing something for this project “Artists Perspectives for the Nation” project. I proposed initiating these investors’ drum circles as a new public performance form. I’m interested in bringing together those two symbols—the symbol of the djembe and the drum circle. unrealized gain/loss vessel - d.peltz - 2012 FLM: I can imagine the public digital stock ticker performing like a soft fleeting stream of information, a kind of (meaningless) illusory comfort blanket. DP: In some way you have to understand its relevance outside of the obvious, right? Because the obvious is illogical. Nobody is actually using that data to day trade, for example. People aren’t sitting there with their computers watching the market data in Times Square or setting up an outdoor office and being like “OK it’s up 3 points or it’s up 1.56, trade! Ok now buy, Ok now sell!” That would be a kind of a nice performance, actually. But actual day traders would want more up to date data than that. To understand what that data is doing is really important. And that’s something I’ve realized—that I’m interested in a particular kind of data visualization, which is not about what data can tell people, but what data can tell people who are visualizing it. For example, in the Cambridge Project “Crossing Non-Signalized Locations” I was interested in the 10,000 excuses archive of data recording five years worth of excuses for why people thought they shouldn’t have received their parking ticket. I was not interested in making that excuse wall so that the public could see and understand this data. Inevitably the data will be seen by others but I was really interested in what the action of visualizing the data told those who were visualizing it. The parking attendants themselves were writing those excuses on the wall—I was interested in what that kind action of writing the excuses on the wall told them about the data. Similarly, I’m interested in designing a way to allow people to pass this data from the unseen universe of the market, through their own bodies, which happens through the merging of the drum and the stock ticker. I’m interested in those two also as symbols; the drum as this symbol of the earth, the body and a pagan counterculture, and the stock ticker referring to the ethereal world of global markets—bringing those two together and making them dependent. I’m often drawn to conceptual propositions that I become invested in testing in a sincere way—at first they often they sound humorous to others, but I have to remember that there is humor in them. I don’t sit around and laugh about these things. I stop finding them funny at all. I’m interested in the proposition that we could know something about the after-work life by drumming in response to our retirement portfolio. So then I become really interested in how to craft that into a viable performance form for myself and others. FLM: The aspect of using sound in “Unrealized Gain/Loss” as a way of embodying the information to the asset holder is really intriguing—using sound as a means of embodying the asset data. Was sound a medium that made sense to use immediately or were you considering other means of attempting to embody it? DP: Well I do use other mediums within the project like textile, ceramic, and batik patterns. I was first drawn to the history of Batik patterns as a socio-economic stratification system and the vessels as a way of embodying or manifesting this data of unrealized gain and loss. My first approach was to work with meditation actually—a meditation workshop with my colleagues. I was going to offer this “Unrealized Gain/Loss” workshop where you would explore the sensations of gain and loss by adapting the way yogi-nidra brings you into contact with your physical surroundings and stretches your perception. FLM: At Naropa University there are/were business & compassion workshops—a sort of mash-up of business and compassion and how compassion could be incorporated into a business model. This process and engagement of “embodying data” also has to do with “Participatory Democracy and the Future of Karaoke” you created at the DNC in Denver in 2008. DP: That kind of appropriation and instrumentalization of spiritual practice could be disturbing and thus compelling as a strategy. For various reasons, I’ve come to be drawn to both the form of a quarterly public performance and the established performance form of a drum circle. Its something I’ve seen myself do before, that is to mess up a really good functional social system like a drum circle or karaoke. I remember I was developing language for the karaoke project and started calling it “Participatory Democracy and the Future of Karaoke” and one of my assistants on the project, who’s an incredible artist, said, “but don’t you think the future of karaoke is guitar hero?” and I realized that maybe he thought I was trying to improve the form. I’m just trying to get people to have this shifted embodied experience, I need to craft the performance context so that they can do that. In the case of the karaoke project, for example, what did I need in order to be able to do this [a person to stand up in front of a bar and deliver a karaoke speech]? I realized that the body is very vulnerable so I built a podium so that the speaker can feel secure enough to do this, otherwise you couldn’t get to this state achieved by passing these speeches through the body. Then I was, like, well you need to be able to practice the lyrics because you don’t know all the “songs” by heart, which became an insert to the massive track books carried by most karaoke VJs. And then sometimes the crowd in the bar isn’t there with me, so I needed to extract the voice of the crowd cheering from the original venue and I needed the local audience to cheer if they wanted to. I’m interested in both where the form succeeds and fails. In particular, one of the most interesting things is this auditory gap between the space where you are, the reduced scale of applause in your own little bar, and this grand scale of applause at the convention center where the speech was originally delivered. FLM: How did the concept of “Participatory Democracy Karaoke” come about and why did you use karaoke as a means of engaging what was happening at the DNC in 2008? DP: I was looking at a lot of different readymade media infrastructures within the city at the time. I was interested in the emergency broadcast systems and I developed a proposal to repurpose that system and karaoke became an important symbol because it was this populist form that was already engaged in exploring the sensation of celebrity but also visualizing the gap between ourselves and those with more power and influence. So it had this readymade capacity to play with power and celebrity and I felt like the Obama presidential campaign, the first one in particular, had some very curious overlaps with this culture of celebrity. Obama of course rose to power partly based on his oratory abilities and I was interested in how karaoke as a vehicle was so adept at offering people all that was left of authentic expression in a political speech. Managing a politician and constructing their identity is such a developed practice that it becomes, kind of automatically, a metaphor for the way that our own identities are constructed. Of course the Obama campaign was very hip and savvy and deploying this notion of grassroots. It was really pioneering in its use of social media and this deployment of notions of populism. I was interested at that time in the capacity of karaoke to track speech patterns, precise tempos of anyone’s delivery, and that to me was a way of thinking about what might be left of the authentic self. I was interested in karaoke’s capacity to extract that authentic component and offer it to others. So not just to stand up and be them, but to [literally] pass their speech patterns through your own body. A long time ago, it started to strike me as odd that one would make media at all. It struck me as a kind of un-contemporary way of going about making art in an age of media overflow. That logic extended into my thinking on delivery devices and installation as well. Why would one buy a screen or even set one up when there are so many out there? And the way in which these media displays function in karaoke bars and bars in general is very interesting to me. I’m drawn to this passive consumption of media where your primary social interaction is with the bartender or a few other individuals but these screens are around you and your attention is shifting back and forth between these spaces. So much political rhetoric is spoken to a half-listening audience. I was interested in what was happening in the slippage and that karaoke was a kind of slippage amplifier. So if you put people in a bar and they are delivering a Kucinich speech and Kucinich comes up on a screen then your getting a sound bite of Kucinich and an image of Kucinich and your friend is talking to you— FLM: A kind of magic takes place in that incongruency between sound and image and the karaoke participant who’s relaying the speech-text at the same time. DP: Exactly and there’s some kind of truth in that experience of reality. FLM: Yeah, there’s something uncanny about seeing the body close-up like that as though it can’t lie to you in that moment or context. It’s a weird moment of luminous clarity. The work you’ve done and all of what you’re saying about karaoke is so very interesting to me. Growing up, my dad and uncles sang karaoke a lot (and still do) and being first-generation Filipino American is a different cultural subtext entirely. I’m also seeing it from the position of witnessing family members who are carriers of these stories and songs. And seeing them cherish these Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley songs so much, I also see how their bodies are literal vessels of popular music that signifies something greater—it signifies their cultural and socioeconomic place in the world. The way that they cherish these American 1950s and 1960s pop songs is similar to having a certain kind of reverence for their spiritual faith or Catholicism. It’s a similar kind of care, focus, and attention exerted in karaoke and Catholicism—that these two structures and systems give something to focus on. Setsuko, Seiji and Hitoshi in Obama, Japan as Obama in Indiana — d. peltz — 2008 DP: Sure there something about the relationship we have to our candidate or the way we go about choosing a candidate, which is very similar to a deity or idol. I learned a lot about karaoke culture through this project. I’d never done karaoke. I’d never been interested in it as a form and then I travelled to Japan as part of the project when I made “Setsuko, Seiji and Hitoshi in Obama, Japan as Barack Obama in Indiana” and it was quite fascinating because my image of karaoke had always been this very public forum in a karaoke bar and then I discovered there’s this whole other world of karaoke where people even go on their own, they go and rent a room or cubicle and sing, or they go on a date—just the two of them go and sit in a room and do karaoke together. FLM: I’m interested in issues that take place within or as a result of specific karaoke culture(s). In the Philippines within the last several years there’s been occurring the “My Way Killings” phenomenon. Apparently baklas or gay men are employed by karaoke establishments to help “smooth over conflicts over karaoke singing”—these social forms of conduct, or lack thereof that arise out of the infrastructures of this social sport. In this one rural part of the Philippines there’s a village karaoke machine that the whole village shares—the Aeta indigenous people have an appointed “keeper” of the karaoke machine. I also see karaoke as a proxy to the confessional box in Catholicism where one goes to pour out their sins (minus the penance and redemption). The karaoke machine enables one to literally sing out whatever’s going on internally, but through highly saturated popular song lyrics. While karaoke is a public and social sport, it can also be a private one. Karaoke is a means of communion with each other. DP: Right, this preference for this kind of mediated communication. In Japan I was trying to organize people to work on this project and I was talking about throwing a party and they were like, well, we have to rent a karaoke machine because what else are we going to do? And I think its kind of serving that function of surrogacy—emotional surrogacy. FLM: And karaoke tools can be read as ritual tools—the magic mic that holds everything. There’s got to be some overlap at some point—between religious ceremony and devotion to the karaoke machine. DP: The way I designed the piece was so that it could slip right on top of the ready-made karaoke infrastructure. There was a flat-packed podium and it was made of a single sheet of plywood with no fasteners that slotted into itself. Those were sent out to a network of karaoke bars that I invited to become “karaoke convention centers.” The local VJs downloaded our custom-made, speech-extracted tracks that were designed to play on their existing equipment. In this sense the piece is a permanent installation. If you go to Denver today, some of the VJs still have the tracks in their library of offerings, the Ramones and Romney. It was this notion of re-purposing readymade infrastructure to create a distributable populist form. Obama was coming and the convention was in the Pepsi Center and 30,000 people were coming including 10,000 journalists. The impetus behind the larger art project that commissioned international artists to make works in Denver, was that local people weren’t going to have much access to this convention. It was like an invasion, the city was being descended upon, but if you lived a block away from the site, you had the same access as people in Zimbabwe&mash;30 second media bits excerpted from the speeches. So it seemed to me that the fundamental gesture was how do I take that signal, which was travelling out of the convention center, and create a local interruption? FLM: Is that what you mean by ‘intervention’? The term is frequently used to help describe your work. DP: It depends on the day. Around that karaoke project I had a conversation with Krzysztof Wodiczko and he was proposing that maybe rather than intervention, we should consider the word interruption. Because intervention is kind of an overused term in the field of art and it has militaristic and therapeutic associations outside of the art context. Fundamentally, the idea of intervening speaks to the readymade social world as your primary material. So it’s basically suggesting a kind of subtractive process, which gets back to this question: what is the role of the contemporary media artist in a world that’s so saturated with media? You can’t work additively in a saturated field. If you want to make a visible mark you have to work subtractively. That’s what intervention is about to me, just another way of saying “to work subtractively.” FLM: So the interventions or interruptions aren’t necessarily adding or subtracting, but are they putting orange cones there? What are they doing exactly? DP: I think you’re right about that, they’re not really subtracting. They’re adding to the scope of possibility. I’ve been thinking (with this exhibition I’m mounting next month) about the work as explorations and expansions of social possibility. Maybe it’s more insertion. I started calling the pieces ‘insertions’ that I was making in Rejmyre—a small town in Sweden where I’ve been working for six years now. My favorite site to install there is the tourist bureau. I started calling the video pieces that I made for the tourist bureau, video insertions. This idea that you’re inserting something into the readymade media infrastructure of the world resonates with me. Insertion leverages a context, creating a possibility that the inserted object might be naturalized in the process — that someone can encounter my video in Rejmyre as tourist information. And then all of a sudden tourist information can include some American guy prostrating through town and it can include really bad relationship advice. Maybe insertion is a better word. tourist information – d. peltz 2009-present  . (shrink)

The various institutional reforms which have led since the end of the 70s to the « privatisation of currency » have formed the main base on which the subsequent power of finance has been built, and, concurently, the dismantling of Welfare could take place. Core of this was the so-called autonomy of central banks, as their « umbilical cord » to national treasuries was severed. From then on, deficit financing and « keynesian » social expenditures became near-impossible. Emphasizing the autonomy (...) of central banks from politics was mostly an institutional mutation meant to free monetary policies from social pressure and make it totally subordinate to rent creation and financial accumulation. No wonder then that « securitisation » of the public debt closely followed on the prohibition to deficit financing social expenditures. And then the outcome was not a reduction, but an explosion of public debt! And as debt servicing becomes a principal item on the budget, the « excessive costs » of welfare provisions is blamed, and a further break-down of social services is called for. It is in the same vein that price inflation is controlled, but assets inflation and speculative bubbles dominate « developped » economies. Meanwhile, in order to compensate for increasing income inequalities and diminishing welfare benefits, an exacerbated form of « private households deficit spending »has come into its own, as witnessed by the subprime crisis and mounting credit card defaults. So we are moving from an entitlements-based provision of social goods to one based on the pure logic of capital and its cycles. The only way out lies in the resocialisation of currency, profound fiscal reforms, the demise of rent-seeking, and the institution of an universal « basic income ». (shrink)

There is a growing literature on corporate social responsibility, but few have focused on the implications of business groups for CSR. We examine the antecedents and outcomes of CSR behaviors of group firms in Korea. We find that group affiliation is associated with higher CSR overall and for its major societal and environmental components. However, the ownership disparity between cash flow and control by controlling inside shareholders is associated with lower CSR, consistent with opportunistic rent expropriation theory. We (...) further find that CSR initiatives can impact group firms positively in the event of bad events, consistent with insurance theory. This motive for CSR as a means of enhancing reputation capital to buffer the bad events is pronounced for group firms because of group-wide dissemination of negative reputational externality. (shrink)

Since the “The Belt and Road” initiative was put forward in 2013, China's foreign investment growth rate has been greatly accelerated. In The Belt and Road context, many scholars used models to analyze the relationship between foreign direct investment, trade flows, and import and export trade. From literature reviews, it is found that previous scholars do not conform to reality and cannot be studied dynamically. Therefore, this study used the panel data of China's foreign direct investment and import and export (...) trade in 40 countries along “The Belt and Road” from 2010 to 2019 to focuses on the impact of foreign direct investment on trade flows, import trade and export trade. Regression analysis was carried out with the trade gravity model and Tinbergen's trade gravity model. In addition to model variables and arguments, the following control variables were adopted: exchange rate, natural resource rents, labor force population, differences in consumer ability, trade openness, and trade agreement signing. The results found that: Foreign direct investment has a positive correlation with trade flow and import and export trade. The labor force population has a negative correlation with trade flow, and import and export trade. The expansion of China's economic scale can increase the scale of China's import and export trade, at the same time, the gap in consumption levels between the two countries will restrict the degree of import and export trade. The possession of natural resources can also promote the development of trade. (shrink)

We examine changing production relations in the Mexican tequila industry to explore the ways in which large industrial firms are using “reverse leasing arrangements,” a form of contract farming, to extend their control over small agave farmers. Under these arrangements, smallholders rent their parcels to contracting companies who bring in capital, machinery, labor, and other agricultural inputs. Smallholders do not have access to their land, nor do they make any of the management decisions. We analyze the factors that (...) have led some producers to participate in reverse leasing arrangements, while allowing other producers to continue farming independently. In addition, we look at the ways in which farmers are responding to these new production relations and constraints and the strategies that they are using to regain control over the production process. (shrink)

The scenario is becoming achingly familiar to me: a woman in her fifties with no health insurance suffers a stroke. With luck, it is a small stroke—a "warning sign." But the patients I'm likely to see as a rehabilitation physician are usually not that lucky. The stroke is invariably large, causing significant disability. And the other familiar part of this scene? While treating her, I discover, unbeknownst to the patient, that her blood sugar and blood pressure are out of (...) class='Hi'>control. Undoubtedly, the undiagnosed hypertension and diabetes contributed to the stroke.So what's the back story? Perhaps she works a job that doesn't provide insurance, or she can't afford the premiums. She has mouths to feed, rent to pay, and .. (shrink)

Un révolutionnaire sommeille en chaque Français, prêt hier comme aujourd'hui à briser les rentes et les privilèges. Dans le même temps, un expert l'observe et le dirige, planifiant autoritairement la société. Et un geek lui tape sur l'épaule, l'entraînant dans le monde inconnu des nouvelles technologies qui fourmille de promesses et de menaces. Ces trois influences parfois contradictoires nous font tourner la tête. Gaspard Koenig propose donc de les interpréter à la lumière d'une nouvelle philosophie politique, fondée sur l'autonomie individuelle. (...) Car ce dont la France a besoin, ce n'est pas d'un énième diagnostic économique, mais de principes solides dont on pourra déduire des réformes radicales. Revenons au modèle révolutionnaire, ce «jacobinisme libéral» incarné par le député du tiers état Isaac Le Chapelier. Rejetons la tentation planiste, léguée par le régime de Vichy et responsable encore aujourd'hui de tant d'injustice et d'exclusion. Apprenons à maîtriser l'utopie numérique, en imaginant un nouvel humanisme qui réponde aux défis de la Silicon Valley et un Etat 2.0 qui nous redonne le contrôle de notre destin numérique. Pays des libertés, la France meurt de servitude volontaire. Terminons, enfin, notre Révolution! Et chacun deviendra son propre maître. (shrink)

The author starts from the hypothesis that it is essential for the countries of the region to critically assess the synergy established between systemic, political corruption and a selectively weak,?devious? nature of the state. Moreover, the key dilemma is whether the expanded practice of political rent seeking supports the conclusion that the root of all corruption is in the very existence of the state - particularly in excessive, selective and deforming state interventions and benefits that create a fertile ground (...) for corruption? The author argues that the destructive combination of weak government and rampant political corruption is based on scattered state intervention, while also rule the parties cartel in the executive branch subordinate to parliament, the judiciary and the police. Corrupt exchange takes place with the absence of strong institutional framework and the precise rules of the political and electoral games, control of public finances and effective political and anti-monopoly legislation and practice included. Exit from the current situation can be seen in the realization of effective anti?corruption strategy that integrates preventive and repressive measures and activities and lead to the establishment of principles of good governance. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Main Street as Art Museum:Metaphor and Teaching StrategiesElizabeth (Beau) Vallance (bio)In truth, walking down Main Street in many American small towns today is rather like walking through an art museum whose walls have mysterious gaps where paintings have been removed for cleaning. Maybe more accurately, walking down Main Street can be rather like walking through the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston after a Vermeer, two Rembrandts, and eleven (...) other artworks were stolen in 1990: since the Gardner's charter does not allow it to rearrange its holdings, the resulting gaps remained with only explanatory notes in their too-large spaces on my last visit there. A town I know well has a disturbing number of empty storefronts, identified with only the faint outlines of their former names, their windows holding explanatory notes in the form of signs proclaiming that they are for sale or rent. Thanks to Wal-Mart and other big-box stores thriving in a distinctly nonpedestrian strip north of town, the commerce that once thrived on Main Street has died or been removed to new locations, and the once-lively street-level shop windows that testified to downtown liveliness for foot traffic are now empty, awaiting new life as, very likely, antique shops or restaurants.But in principle, a walk down Main Street can be very much like a stroll through a museum gallery—visually rich, inviting unexpected choices, aesthetically rewarding. This article explores the concept of shop windows as visually ordered compositions much like paintings and other art objects and suggests some approaches to applying this concept in teaching a range of subjects and styles of art in both classrooms and actual museums. For the purposes of argument, we will assume that our mythical Main Street is alive [End Page 25] with businesses of many kinds, with the old-fashioned windows open to the street that allow us to "window shop" for many blocks. Some of my examples are drawn from the very enjoyable experience they still offer, of wandering from image to image, commenting as we go.Museum Visitors as Window-ShoppersConsider the behavior of the average museum visitor, a composite characterization drawn from my years as a museum educator and augmented by a few statistics on how people comport themselves in museums and other public places. The behavior of visitors in art museums is an especially clear case of how people observe deliberate compositions, for in art museums objects are typically arranged fairly sparely, with minimal crowding of the objects themselves, small labels that may or may not explain much about the painting or sculpture or silver tureen, good lighting, and a fairly hushed atmosphere, unless a crowd has gathered for a family festival or a major exhibition.Generally, people come to museums in pairs or small groups and not necessarily with a clear plan beyond perhaps seeing a particular favorite work of art or generally catching the highlights of the collection. Their purpose may be social as much as specifically educational, and those who come with companions tend to chat a bit as they walk through the collection. Generally, other things being equal, they turn to the right on entering the building.1 After that, however, visitors become unpredictable, and they meander among the objects in ways the museum cannot control unless visitors are following a live tour guide or a printed self-guiding tour that recommends stopping at selected objects in a predetermined order. Visitors may move to a large object located in the center of the gallery (such as a medieval suit of armor, an Egyptian mummy case, or an enormous painting on a freestanding wall partition), or to a case filled with many small precious-looking objects (such as pre-Columbian gold jewelry from Peru, or the tiny bass sculptures that are gold weights from the Ashanti culture in Ghana). They may be drawn to something in a familiar style, such as a large Impressionist painting or a Rembrandt-looking portrait. They may gravitate to a favorite object in the collection, or they may be attracted by a new acquisition or a work recently installed after many years in storage. At all these stops, they... (shrink)

Douglass North once emphasized that development takes centuries, but he did not have a theory of how and why change occurs. This groundbreaking book advances such a theory by examining in detail why England and Spain developed so slowly from 1000 to 1800. A colonial legacy must go back centuries before settlement, and this book points to key events in England and Spain in the 1260s to explain why Mexico lagged behind the United States economically in the twentieth century. Based (...) on the integration of North's institutional approach with Mancur Olson's collective action theory, Max Weber's theory of value change, and North's focus on dominant coalitions based on rent and military in In the Shadow of Violence, this theory of change leads to exciting new historical interpretations, including the crucial role of the merchant-navy alliance in England and the key role of George Washington's control of the military in 1787. (shrink)

Economic analysis is being applied by scholars to an increasing range of legal problems. This collection brings together some of the main contributions to an important area of this work, the economics of contract law. The essays and illuminating notes, questions, and introductions provided by the editor outline the Law and Economics framework for analyzing contractual relationships. The first two parts of the book present a number of useful concepts - adverse selection, moral hazard, and rent seeking - and (...) a general way of thinking about the economics of contracting and contract law. The remainder of the book considers a wide range of topics and issues. The recurring theme is that contracting parties want to assign the responsibility for adjusting to particular contingencies to the party best able to control the costs of adjustment. The adjustment problem is exacerbated by the fact that the parties might engage in various types of strategic behavior, such as opportunism, moral hazard, and rent-seeking. Many contract law doctrines can best be understood as attempts to replicate how reasonable parties might resolve this adjustment problem. (shrink)

Current arguments to increase shareholder power in the large public U.S. corporation need to take account of the well-established historical practice of extensive delegation by shareholders of business decision-making and agenda-control to management and the board, what might be characterized as an absolute delegation rule. This practice sharply limits the power of shareholders to put either business or governance proposals to the shareholders for dispositive resolution. The paper, originally published in 1991 but newly relevant, argues that the rule is (...) based on potential pathologies in shareholder voting rather than the inherent information asymmetry between shareholders and managers. Rational shareholders who know of this asymmetry (and know that others know) would simply vote against most shareholder proposals. But shareholder voting gives rise to potential cycling problems, as shifting shareholder majorities vie for preferred policies, and potential opportunism, as shareholders engage in side deals with management and other shareholders to extract rents in corporate decision-making. Since shareholding patterns are in part a response to control rights, deviations from the absolute delegation rule will predictably lead to greater block ownership, for defensive and offensive reasons. These concerns need to be addressed in arguments for the expansion of shareholder power. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 155–158 Michel Serres. Biogea . Trans. Randolph Burks. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing. 2012. 200 pp. | ISBN 9781937561086 | $22.95 Conveying to potential readers the significance of a book puts me at risk of glad handing. It’s not in my interest to laud the undeserving, especially on the pages of this journal. This is not a sales pitch, but rather an affirmation of a necessary work on very troubled terms: human, earth, nature, and the problematic world we made. (...) It is this world that aspirates the silence (so to speak), and therefore the subject which, along with the development of the “made world” exports the excess augmentation of the cosmically missing, this silence of the natural, et cetera. Had we learned from Locke that lesson of “labor,” to consume what we need… but perhaps we need more than what matters? Serres’ Biogea has several functions on this manner, if it is indeed a book to be consumed. First, readers searching for novelistic entertainment have a place to dwell. Biogea deserves a place in your back pocket; biographical generosity and poetic fluidity should satisfy most textual fetishes. For lay philosophers who want to refresh their acumen, Biogea deserves a place on the book shelf, one already reads a sorely needed postmodern tune-up here. Serres’ style is clearly French; he leaves few cheese crumbs on his words, rather preciseness and breathing in the work give way to a sweeping manner that breaks the narrative line of sight. A circular narrative and anachronistic fragmentation of terms allows an abyssal atmosphere to swell, if only to pump into the book the externality of its broader text. Biogea aspires to a higher standard and the book, at times, is thinking this negentropic problem too. Univocal, the publisher, has crafted a book appropriate for the hands to hold and the translations are an achievement of an otherwise difficult writer to translate. Terms are the conditions of a broader text. It is important to note that Serres’ content is as much a thinking of terminal ports. There is a regard for the transportation technology of the written word. For me, this is the mark of genius, a craftiness that tells of a book device that I may trust. Serres is an accomplished thinker and a necessary voice to check the putative trendiness of anti-postmodernist and market-driven theory of endless cultural liquidation. Offering interventions on subjectivity as an open system we are given a chance to affirm the human, not merely to discard it, but to engage its poetic image emotion, the calibratory silent sense of the analogic world; the terms on which we base our efforts. 1 The human is the center of its own negation, constantly mediating it. Something deeper at stake appears in the work then, and it is quite obvious from the onset. Certainly, a book is an intensification of possible text and those who brought this actual book into existence have captured a rarity in regards to the subject matter and artistic accomplishment. I mentioned terms as conditions, so let us understand Biogea as bio-yea, a yes to bios . An affirmation of living and accepting presence for all of its defiance of images, words, and things temporal. Therefore Serres’ existence and its existants plays parts; out of linearity and still like a porous bone pumping blood it manufactures into the fleshy life it becomes. Starting from a man named silence chaos emerges, or the man “Old Taciturn” takes up a journey anticipating a great flood. In other words, a development akin to the one in Genesis. In dealing with this ancestral occupation, fusing Genesis with contemporary philosophical terms, Serres initiates this anachronistic fragmentation under the forming subjectivity of his own autobiography. This mutation in the open system is precisely one of Serres’ terms. There an abyss is at work, stated, but also measured by heels on the ground—the abyss dispatching earthen tensions, that which plays our tunes, that which we abide by and recognize in volcanoes, rivers, oceans, earthquakes and weaponry in the battles of the world. Set in later stages of the book, such tensions are harnessed through scientific principles in an attempt to unify the terms of natural force if only to terminate the world. Thus the elevation of the earth into the world is clearly set forth. Here already, and few pages in, a resonance is set forth under appellations such as the river Garonne, a subjectivity as much as it is inhuman, the river is the inhuman that makes us human. I get the sense that Serres is taking up a challenge issued by Wallace Stevens; namely, that the great poems of heaven and hell have been written, but that only the poem of the earth has resisted composition. 2 On this level we cannot avoid the killing factor of silence, given that our cognition blocks its pure, radical obliteration. Thus a silence of attunement to the earth is in a novel dialectic of the rithmic and rhythm. A technological world, a triumph of termination is set forth. If a text imposes its will given the reader who authorizes it, it is made to convey or convect a presupposition to a reader or its inhabitant(s). Text is therefore both, in-content, contenting, contentedness, and in reading it, a way to navigate self-destruction (dis-content). Here then would one note that the “inhuman” reveals itself, “an aperiodic rhythm of lovers and beloved…the sea as our friend…but as our enemy…maternal vivifying sea.” The sea is an open book, or vaginal birth canal, where the engagement of text comes forth: “…woman sea, open vulva.” One sees like the sea, but only after it, when the uninhabitable truth of inhabiting it switches the polarity of the sailors soul: “I was seeing like the sea” (9-11). In other words, we are invited to embrace the nonsense of the visible. At this point I am taken to Jean-François Lyotard’s work The Inhuman , specifically the first entry on negentropy that would be congruent with Serres’ thematic. 3 The human being exports, deports, or transplants its relation through text, through the system— and this is its sense or relation to silence, to music. Unaware of Serres’ proximity to this work, the concept of gender interrelation as regards a solar catastrophe runs clear. It would be, on this basis, that Serres references his peers, the other texts that, as mentioned above, are discarded in philosophy today. For students of philosophy what we have here is perhaps a gift, a needed project. If silence and death are at work, there is a political valence to deal with, and here, much like the domain of the text and the dominion of the reader, we confront the world of natural, fluid violence. The anti-postmodernist critique is in part based on a weak idea that the loss of ideology, of a world vision, motivates the “correlationist” project. 4 Serres seems to offer another way to view this when he notes that whereas persons “sometimes kill,” it is clearly “the collective” that “always kills” (17). What is the collective today, if not an organizing function we never see yet acts in its favor in the name of truth? One feels a sense of enigma here, if only to link to what Stevens remarked of communism as a “grubby faith,” providing this applies for capitalism as well, namely any ideology of progress overly interested in absolutes. Here we get the sense that the inhuman, silence, this type of killing, always killing, could not be matched by human-made, political dynamos. Or that if it comes to an equilibrium, a catastrophe is never too far from us to read with our heels. We are left to note that the forces of nature presuppose and permeate political systems, the more these systems obtain force, the more the system takes upon itself the proper name of nature that motivates its dissemination, albeit falsely. This note, that in an age of ecocide and technological captivity (sustainability and transparency) political regimes won’t grow our soul-learning ears any larger than our tongues, stands clear to us. The promise of technological desubjectification is here pushed aside. Regarding politics, Serres illustrates this fact: Where did this corpse come from? Who was it? Who killed it? I don’t know. I won’t try to find out. I refuse to get vengeance for it. And I only see Garonne. For our victims, today, are the rivers, too. Their waters have irrigated my life, enchanted my thought, invigorated my body; I’ve known them to be threatening, untamable, as dangerous as the sea when it rages. Yes, murderous. They decided to control their courses; dams, sometimes senseless, destroying sites and valleys, reduced entire populations to servile displacements; programs for the irrigation of thirsty farmland, often beneficial of course, completed their drying up.(22) Serres enters into his idea concerning the captivity of language from the natural into a world system: For thousands of years, we have been licking things with our tongues, covering and daubing them so as to appropriate things for ourselves. If language boils down to a convention, this convention took place between the speakers without consulting the thing named, become as a result the property of those who covered it in this way with their drawn or voiced productions. Malfeasance analyzes these acts of appropriation. Thus every inert object, every living thing as well, sleeps under the covers of signs, a little in the way that, today, a thousand posters shouting messages and ugly riots of color drown, with their filthy flood, the landscapes, or better, exclude them from perception because the meaning, almost nil, of this false language and these base images forms an irresistible source of attraction to our neurons and eyes. This appropriation covers the world’s beauty with ugliness. (38-39) Technological concealment coming to bear, we begin to get a sense of another commentary on the condition of sensing, driving home the necessity of a text dealing with such subject matter to be what its terms insist. Thus toward new openings: The new opening. As low beneath our feet as you like, the Biogea opens us to another space, high enough for us to be able to acquire a wisdom there, that of redeveloping this same place differently from our fathers, this place that’s still politically cut up by old hatreds, beneath the flood of tears and blood that we call history. Without this soft place, spiritually very old, but newly conceived in this way, without the juridical construction of a common good, opposed to our filthy ownership, I don’t see how our planet, hard, will survive. Hardness that depends on a softness, material belonging that depends on this temporary rented location (51). Serres enters into a summit on the content and the structure of his work. Archimedes is brought in with the concept of three volcanoes. Meaning fire, but as well earth, water, air. For it was Archimedes’ war machines that sought to lift the earth, thus bringing in the question of principles of science: “can a principle be invented while controlling its consequences?” (66-7). May the earth be put in a sentence, terminated by terminology, appellations, gone wild? By means of these element-dominating laws, this old physicist began to tear nature away from the ancient myths; by a strange return, today we’re plunging our successes back into the anxieties and terrors from which that ancient physics was born. Yes, our new history of science and technology is plunging, today, as though in a loop, into the fundamental human myths from which Empedocles’ first laws came. A major progression and a regression on the nether side of the origins. Consequently, the contemporary time requires that we try to return to that unity in which the principles of hate and love are at the same time human, living, inert and global. We will never attain a deontology of our knowledge and actions without thinking the subjective, the objective, the collective, and the cognitive all together simultaneously. Here, hate and love are the result of these four components.(71) Working then on the concept of fire-starting mirrors to the atomic annihilation of the Second War, Serres works into the subjectivity in question on the matter of rhythm—say rithmic— precisely at that point: Knowledge is changing today. The all-political is dying; the monarchy of the sciences said to be hard is coming to a close. The science of the things of the world will have to communicate just as much as the things of the world do, which do it much better than humans do, who don’t always want to do it. Let’s celebrate two changes this morning. The first one strikes a new blow to our narcissism. No, knowledge and the world don’t resemble our analytical enjoyments of refined cutting up, of endless debates and of exclusions full of hate. They, on the contrary, form a bloc and a sum, alliance and alloys. Uniting the fields of knowledge among themselves the way the things are connected among themselves, the second newness puts into place sets united by interlacing, webs and simplexes that combine with the things of the world, themselves combined, the combined knowledge that understands them.(130-1) Biogea closes on its opening flood thematic, approaching the initial telos of Genesis. Here the trees are brought into a position with atmosphere, the opaque abyssal reservoir, the tomb of the sun, sea in the polarity of the earthen heaven and hell. The poem of the earth then is silent but deadly, indeed, as funny as that phrase is, mainly a tomb gas. The meaning of the living and the non-meaning of things converge in the muteness of the world; this meaning and non-meaning plunge there and come out, the ultimate eddy. Mundus patet: through a fissure, through an opening, a fault, a cleft come noises, calls as small as these apertures. I’m listening, attentive, I’m translating, I’m advancing in the scaled-down meaning and science. Mundus patet: should the world open greatly, it will launch me into its silence. The totality remains silent. Knowledge expanded in elation. White origin of meaning, fountain of joy. (198) Final Remarks One test of a review is the long term trajectory the referee thinks the book will have. I see Serres’ text lending greatly into the vision of Biogea . In fact, in the vision of the novel inquiries of Stephen Jay Gould’s work there is something to be thought on the level of the individual and the species; namely, that humanity and its uniqueness is in its deferral, its thinking and naming, a thinking surrounded by silence that filters into everything, that pulls us through the world, the kinetic pulse we recognize, and all of that we cleave away in the base philosophical maxim of difference itself. Unique individuals are spatial creatures: we dwell, and we ought to get good at it. Yet this is an imaginative space that, if you are crazy enough to believe it, de-term-ine the conditions of its own terms. That is why we are not merely creating spaces on the acceleration of time, or so this ignoramus thinks, to accidentally transcend. Imagination already has this insatiable silence that we drink up and fail to manifest. Space is timeless. The imagination itself, shared by humans for themselves, their objects, and the species as a whole, is a non-defined space of relation; a whole human trajectory as part of nature, and part of worlds that are the other side of thinking nature, the consequence of it, at least our attempt to do so. Our survival is based on our deliberation, our caution, our natural deconstructive sense toward this silence that is already part of the song, sung, singing of this century without end. Good books will let us inhabit this space and recognize a form of life. Serres’ text moves toward dwelling, as noted, in masterful and accessible ways. The pitched battles are the falling replays of anemic and dead politics. As soon as we realize there is humanity, we may be able to enjoy the end of it, our inhuman capability of listening to silence. NOTES 1. See Michel Serres. The Parasite . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2007. 2. Wallace Stevens, “Imagination as Value” [ca. 1945], in Collected Poetry and Prose . New York: The Library of America. 1997. 724-39. 3. Jean-François Lyotard. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time . Trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1992. 4. See the introduction: Quentin Melliassoux. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency . Trans. Ray Brassier. New York: Continuum. 2008. EDITOR'S NOTE: This review was updated on August 8, 2012. Substantial edits include block quotes from the book under review as well as the inclusion of comments from the author. (shrink)

Efforts for better services are achieved by small steps such as analyzing data of the customer. What is significant for the customer should as well significant for the banking institution. Transparency and a better understand- ding of the pattern behavior of customers can be used for the good of both partners such as good relationships in the fu- ture eventually be beneficial for the customer as well as a banking institution. The responsibility of both sides is crucial to understand the (...) accountability of customers and banking institutions. The method of identification of user messages of the banking application proposed in the article involves the use of user data for information processing, taking into account the peculiarities of the use of mobile devices and the user's dialogue with bank messages. Also, the proposed method allows you to rank messages to identify the most important messages and get the desired result by providing ef- fective recommendations in favor of each of the participants in customer interaction with the bank. The introduction of modern educational programs "Information Control Systems and Technologies", "Artificial Intelligence Systems" and "Systems Analysis" in the field of information technology, allows users and managers to interact with the bank's custo- mers sufficient information to make informed recommendations for effective management decisions. The article consi- ders the conceptual model of interaction of users and managers on interaction with users of the bank, use of technolo- gies and algorithms of artificial intelligence, machine learning processes to formalize the process of dialogue, systema- tization and ranking of messages and notifications between customers and managers. The Conceptual model of inter- action of the user of banking services with messages is presented. The article also describes the features of the dialogue between the user of banking services and the manager for the implementation of algorithms for interaction with custo- mers. The example of the city block of bank users considers and takes into account the difference in the amount of in- formation received by the bank, which must be sent during different periods of the week and take into account the amount of information to be sent, which will be significantly less and, consequently, the number of necessary services. will also be smaller. In this example, taking into account the amount of information that can be consumed during differ- rent periods of the week, the number of services that can be provided to the user will also be much smaller. The reflec- tion of such interactions in the model is an important aspect, as noted in the article. (shrink)