Francis Fukuyama: Democracy Needs Elites

“Populism exists because institutions are elite‐driven,” but democracies don't work well without elites, says the acclaimed author of The End of History.     

The Effects of Employee Hours-of-Service Regulations on the U.S. Airline Industry

Maximum employee work-hour restrictions are implemented to reduce accidents. However, because they decrease the stock of work hours available to employers in the short run, they may also have detrimental effects. A quasi-experiment suggests that pilot hours-of-service reforms, which decreased the number of flights and hours a pilot may work, reduced consumer choice and increased fares in the airline industry. We find that regional and low-cost carriers reduced scheduled flight frequency, while less constrained legacy carriers (and potentially their wholly owned subsidiaries) were unaffected. Further, we find evidence that market concentration increased on many routes, implying that fare increases may be due to a decrease in competition. These findings suggest a situation where a policy implemented to correct one market failure, airlines not internalizing the full social costs of accidents by allowing dangerously fatigued pilots to fly, exacerbated another market failure by decreasing competition.     

What to do with all these Bayes factors: How to make Bayesian reports in deception research more informative

Bayes factors quantify the evidence in support of the null (absence of an effect) or the alternative hypothesis (presence of an effect). Based on commonly used cut‐offs, Bayes factors between 1/3 and 3 are interpreted as evidentially weak, and one typically concludes there is an absence of evidence. In this commentary on Warmelink, Subramanian, Tkacheva, and McLatchie (Legal Criminol Psychol 24, 2019, 258), we discuss how a Bayesian report can be made more informative. Firstly, this implies a departure from the labels provided by commonly used cut‐offs when reporting Bayes factors. Instead, we encourage researchers to report the value of the Bayes factors, or to convert these values into nominal support for the hypotheses. Secondly, researchers can provide recommendations to design follow‐up studies by examining the posterior distribution of the magnitude of the effect size. Lastly, we show how individual Bayes factors can be evaluated in the context of large‐scale meta‐analyses.     

Mistakes in Algorithmic Trading of Cryptocurrencies

How should the doctrine of unilateral mistake apply when a programming error results in a buyer's algorithmic trading programme accepting an offer generated by the seller's trading programme to exchange cryptocurrencies at 250 times the current market rate? How should the knowledge element be adapted given that algorithmic trading necessarily means that the traders’ minds were not engaged at the moment the contract was formed? These novel issues came before the Singapore Court of Appeal in Quoine Pte Ltd v B2C2 Ltd. The decision further cautions customers of cryptocurrency exchanges not to assume that they have property rights in the cryptocurrencies held by the exchange and to examine carefully the nature of asset holding arrangement found in the documentation.     

National Solidarity,Global Impartiality,and the Performance of Philosophical Theory. The Example of Migration Policy

This paper explores the issue of whether an international system of nation-states can be defended from a global perspective of impartiality. At present, it seems as if the nation-state were the only suitable institutional location for the realization of effective systems of social justice. Provided that national politics is indeed disposed to promote the freedom and well-being of its citizens, a decentralized system of nation-states is likely to produce beneficial effects. Experience, however, teaches that national politics has in many instances had decidedly negative effects. For that reason, the existing system of nation-states cannot be defended from a global point of view. Hence, the question turns on whether a system of nation-states could conceivably find the support of rational persons if it incorporated substantive restrictions on national politics. This paper discusses the liberty to migrate as one of the many options potentially available for the correction of the existing international regime. As the closer inspection of the underlying philosophical question reveals, the problem can only be resolved with reference to a normatively relevant understanding of the kind of persons we take ourselves to be. From the conclusion that the freedom to migrate is to be understood as a fundamental liberty, the discussion then turns to the legitimate limitations that might be imposed by national immigration policies. It is argued that—in order to accommodate what is demanded by both global impartiality and national solidarity—open admission policies must not in effect place at a disadvantage those who are already relatively worse off under a present distribution, for this would violate basic conditions for the development and confirmation of socially acquired self-esteem     

Detection of thiopental and pentobarbital in head and pubic hair in a case of drug-facilitated sexual assault

The quali-quantitative determination of two barbiturates, thiopental and its metabolite pentobarbital, in head and pubic hair samples of a woman who had been sexually assaulted during hospitalisation, is reported. Hair was analysed by means of solid-phase microextraction (SPME) and gas chromatography-multiple mass spectrometry (GC-MS-MS), in chemical ionisation conditions. Thiopental and pentobarbital were found in three proximal head hair segments (sample 1A: 0.30 and 0.40 ng/mg; sample 1B: 0.20 and 0.20 ng/mg; sample 3: 0.15 and 0.20 ng/mg) and pubic hair sample. Two distal head hair segments were negative for both barbiturates. Despite the lack of collection and toxicological analysis of blood or urine samples within the hospital setting, analytical findings from hair revealed the use of the anaesthetic agent thiopental to sedate the victim quickly and deeply and commit sexual assault.