Poverty: A Very Short Introduction

No one wants to live in poverty. Few people would want others to do so. Yet, we find ourselves in a situation where millions of people worldwide live in poverty. According to the World Bank in 2010, 1.2 billion people lived below the extreme poverty line with an income of US $1.25 or less a day and 2.4 billion lived on less than US$2 a day. Why is that? What has been done about it in the past? And what is being done about it now? In this Very Short Introduction Philip N. Jefferson explores how the answers to these questions lie in the social, political, economic, educational, and technological processes that impact all of us throughout our lives. The degree of vulnerability is all that differentiates us. He shows how a person\u27s level of vulnerability to adverse changes in their life is very much dependent on the circumstances of their birth, including where their family lived, the schools they attended, whether it was peacetime or wartime, whether they had access to clean water, and whether they are male or female. Arguing that while poverty is ancient and enduring, the conversation about it is always new and evolving, Jefferson looks at the history of poverty, and the practical and analytical efforts we have made to eradicate it, and the prospects for further poverty alleviation in the future

The Conflicted Assumptions of Modern Constitutional Law

Contribution to Symposium - The Nature of Judicial Authority: A Reflection on Philip Hamburger\u27s Law and Judicial Dut

“Cardozo’s Foot”: The Chancellor’s Conscience and Constructive Trusts

The chancellor\u27s foot is a term coined by English legal scholar John Selden for the argument that equity is an unjustified and unfortunate interference in the regular course of the rule of law. This issue is examined by focusing on a particular doctrine of equity, the constructive trust, and on a seminal figure in the development of the modern US understanding of constructive trusts, Benjamin Cardozo

Missing Market in Labor Quality: The Role of Quality Markets in Transition

This paper characterizes a key feature of the classic socialist economy and state-owned enterprise, namely that of missing markets in labor quality. Under the socialist regime in which students and workers were assigned to work units, the rights of managers to monitor and reward workers were limited. The exchange of labor services was based more on measures of quantity rather than quality. Workers who performed functions broadly consistent with that of their assigned occupations for the duration of the designated workweek received the standard wage. With the reassignment of property rights, this situation has changed. Students and workers have resumed control over the accumulation of their human capital the trade of skill and effort. Managers have acquired greater authority to monitor labor - to discriminate in setting wages and bonuses and to hire and fire - as well as stronger incentives to use this authority to raise efficiency and profits. The result is an emerging market in labor quality.A 1995 cross section of enterprise data spanning 10 ownership types is used to test the hypothesis of an emerging labor quality market. The results show that certain non-state forms of ownership, in which the rights of managers to monitor and reward skill and effort are presumed to be relatively well developed, encourage labor quality, most notably training, which raises productivity. The relative inability of state enterprises to monitor and reward high quality labor is likely to create an adverse selection problem in which the most skilled and motivated workers exit from the state sector, so as to cause a "hollowing" of skilled workers and weakened enterprise performance. The theoretical contribution of this paper is to generalize Coase's analysis of the critical role of property rights in creating resource markets to the creation and exchange of quality in all goods. Analytically, the conditions for a missing market in labor quality are equivalent to those for a missing market in pollution abatement and water quality. The analysis underscores the importance of property rights in creating the conditions for the accumulation and efficient exchange of human capital.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39645/3/wp260.pd

A Tribute to Hon. George Bundy Smith -- Excellence

A tribute to George Bundy Smith, focusing on his commitment to excellence as a teacher, mentor, and professional

A New Statistic: The US Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure

This article examines the dynamic relationship between macroeconomic performance and measures of poverty in the United States. The article is organized as follows. Section 2 presents insights on the relationship between poverty and macroeconomic performance that emerge from the literature. The emphasis is on empirical studies from 1986 to 2011. Section 3 provides a snapshot of the change in poverty over National Bureau of Economic Research-dated recessions for a variety of poverty measures. Section 4 uses vector autoregressions (VARs) to characterize the response of poverty to innovations in various social indicators and measures of macroeconomic performance. Section 5 expands the empirical analysis to include alternative measures of poverty—a consumption-based poverty rate constructed by Meyer and Sullivan (2010) and an income-based poverty rate constructed by Broda and colleagues (2009) by using a consumer price index that has been adjusted for substitution and quality bias. Section 6 conducts a forecasting exercise for income poverty and consumption poverty. Section 7 concludes and offers suggestions for future research

The feeding ecology of some zooplankters that are important prey items of larval fish

Diets of 76 species of fish larvae from most oceans of the world were inventoried on the basis of information in 40 published studies. Although certaln geographlc, size- and taxon-specific patterns were apparent, certain zooplankton taxa appeared in the diets of larvae of a variety of fish species in numerous localities. Included were six genera of calanoid copepods (Acartia, Calanus, Centropages, Paracalanus, Pseudocaianus, Temora), three genera of cyclopoid copepods (Corycaeus, Oilhona, Oncata), harpacticoid copepods, copepod nauplii, tintinoids, cladocerans of the genera Evadne and Podon, barnacle nauplii, gastropod larvae, pteropods of the genus Limacina, and appendicularians. Literature on feeding habits of these zooplankters reveals that most of the copepods are omnivorous, feeding upon both phytoplankton and other zooplankton. Some taxa, such as Calanus, Paracalanus, Pseudocalanus, and copepod nauplii appear to be primarily herbivorous, while others, such as Acartia, Centropages, Temora, and cyclopoids exhibit broad omnivory or carnivory. The noncopepod zooplankters are primarily filter-feeders upon pbytoplankton and/or bacterioplankton. Despite the importance of zooplankters in larval fish food webs, spectic knowledge of the feeding ecology of many taxa is poor. Further, much present knowledge comes only from laboratory investigations that may not accurately portray feeding habits of zooplankters in nature. Lack of knowledge of the feeding ecology of many abundant zooplankters, which are also important in larval fish food webs, precludes realistic understanding of pelagic ecosystem dynamics. (PDF file contains 34 pages.