Indebted life and money culture: payday lending in the United Kingdom

Critical social scientific research holds that credit–debt is a principal economic and governing relation in contemporary economy and society, but largely neglects money’s role in indebted life. Drawing on qualitative research in the payday loan market in the United Kingdom, the paper shows that borrowers typically relate to loans in monetary rather than financial terms and incorporate them into practices of payment, spending and online banking. To analyse how indebted life is variously experienced and enacted through money, the concept of money culture is developed to refer to money’s culture, money’s meanings and money’s affects. Borrowers enter into and negotiate payday loans through a digitally mediated money culture that both mobilizes and runs counter to money’s powerful fictions as circulating universal equivalent and calculative means of account.     

The Inner Enemies of Democracy

The Inner Enemies of Democracy. By Tzvetan Todorov, trans. Andrew Brown (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2014), pp.vi + 201. £20.00 (cloth).     

Withdrawal symptoms: Social and cultural aspects of the October 6 coup

Abstract

Extract

In themselves, military coups are nothing new in modern (or ancient) Thai history. There have been at least eight successful, and many more unsuccessful, coups since the one that overthrew the absolute monarchy in 1932. It is therefore not altogether surprising that some Western journalists and academics have depicted the events of October 6 1976 as “typical” of Thai politics, and even as a certain “return to normalcy” after three years of unsuitable flirtation with democracy. In fact, however, October 6 marks a clear turning point in Thai history for at least two quite different reasons. First, most of the important leaders of the legal left-wing opposition of 1973–1976, rather than languishing in jail or in exile like their historical predecessors, have joined the increasingly bold and successful maquis. Second, the coup was not a sudden intra-elite coup de main, but rather was the culmination of a two-year-long right-wing campaign of public intimidation, assault and assassination best symbolized by the orchestrated mob violence of October 6 itself.     

A Unique Denial: Israel's Foreign Policy and the Armenian Genocide

This article focuses on the Israeli politicization of the Armenian genocide from the perspective of foreign policy. Since the early 1980s Israel's official position has been to not recognize the Armenian genocide. The issue of recognition came to the surface in 1982 after Turkey put pressure on Israel to cancel a Holocaust and genocide conference. This article shows that Israel agreed to pressure the conference organizers to cancel the conference in order to secure protection for Jews fleeing Iran and Syria through the Turkish border. This article also explores the role of informal ambassadors in shaping Israel's position on this issue. Using recently declassified archival documents and oral interviews with key Israeli stakeholders, this is the first investigation into the role of informal ambassadors, specifically the Jewish minority in Turkey, and the American Jewish pro-Israeli lobby. The article also addresses a secondary incentive for Israel's refusal to recognize the genocide: ethnic competition between Jews and Armenians as victims of genocide.     

The World Bank's land of kiosks: Community driven development in Timor-Leste

The World Bank's Community Empowerment and Local Governance Project (CEP) was the key donor programme to assist with community reconstruction in a newly independent Timor-Leste. Commencing in 2000, the US$18 million project provided funds to over 400 local development councils that had been newly created to meet their community's development needs. Rather than creating genuine participatory structures, tight deadlines to disburse project funds and bureaucratic project rules reduced the councils to little more than transmission lines to Bank-controlled dollars. By bypassing existing governance structures, including that of the fledging government, the councils also bypassed sources of local legitimacy and technical knowledge, which resulted in community conflict, indifference, and poor project sustainability. The CEP's poorly administered microcredit scheme led to a proliferation of unviable kiosks—underlining the folly of hastily attempting to construct a market economy on a deeply scarred subsistence economy.     

The case against the use of polygraph examinations to monitor post‐conviction sex offenders

In this article I caution against the use of polygraph testing in convicted sex‐offenders programs. First, I explain that the prevalent method of polygraph testing, the CQT, suffers from several major flaws and has no scientific basis. These flaws, which characterize all usages of the CQT, including its use with sex offenders, create a considerable risk for false positive as well as false‐negative errors. Second, no methodologically sound research examining the validity of the CQT, neither in its forensic application, nor in its use with sex offenders has been conducted. Finally, I explain why the use of CQT polygraphy with sex offenders is even more problematic than its common use as an aid in criminal investigations. Clearly, rehabilitation programs of convicted sex offenders are highly important, but the use of polygraph testing in this context is misguided and instead of reducing recidivism in sex offenders is likely to achieve just the opposite.     

Fair use and copyright protection: a price theory explanation

Copyright scholars suggest that computer technology has reduced transaction costs associated with copyright transfer, allegedly eliminating the need for the fair-use doctrines that were developed to allow limited use of copyrighted material in situations where the transaction costs of securing authorized use would be prohibitive. According to this emerging view, in an ideal world with no contracting costs, third party use of copyrighted material could realistically only take place with the express consent of the copyright holder. This would give the author absolute power to dispose of his work, including the right to veto uses, without the possibility of a fair use “override” of any sort.This paper shows the limits of such transaction cost-based arguments. If transaction costs provide the dominant economic justification of “fair-use” doctrines, an exogenous reduction of such transaction costs would limit the scope and application of the defense of fair use. Nevertheless, in this paper we suggest that, when viewed in light of the anticommons theory, fair-use doctrines retain a valid efficiency justification even in a zero transaction-cost environment. Fair-use defenses are justifiable, and in fact instrumental, in minimizing the welfare losses prompted by the strategic behavior of the copyright holders. Even if copyright licenses can be transferred at no cost (for instance, in a “click and pay” frictionless computer world), the strategic behavior of the copyright holders would still create possible deadweight losses.In this context, we identify a number of critical variables that should guide and constrain the application of fair-use doctrines. These variables include (a) the number of copyright holders; (b) the degree of complementarity between the copyrighted inputs; (c) the degree of independence between the various copyright holders in the pricing of their licenses; and (d) ability to price discriminate.