The Recent Environmental History of Tiger Leaping Gorge: environmental degradation and local land development in northern Yunnan

Over the past 150 years few Western and Chinese scholars have examined the nature of the environment in Hutiao xia (Tiger Leaping Gorge) and its various inhabitants. However, as a unique geographical and geological feature, one of Asia's deepest gorges, part of the headwaters of the Yangtze River, and a common destination for tourists, the gorge has taken on greater and greater significance. Americans, Chinese literati, Party Cadres, and others have commented on Tiger Leaping Gorge. This essay will examine both the local environment and local environmental practices related to the gorge. Considering historical and contemporary land use practices, the gorge and its changing status can act as a microcosm of western China's various kinds of land development strategies, their implications for local and larger concerns, and land use ideologies of various sorts. Through discussing soil composition, water management, natural vegetation patterns, population growth, and recent developments in tourism, this essay will discuss the human impact on the natural environment of Tiger Leaping Gorge between the 1870s and 2002. It will not only demonstrate patterns in environmental degradation based on both natural and human processes, it will also show that depending on the form of institutional authority and local management practices, the environment in the gorge has been most effected by the political and ideological changes of the last half-century in comparison to earlier times. However, despite increasing challenges in the face of various human factors, some recent environmental practices have succeeded in helping to minimize elements of local soil and vegetation degradation.     

An analysis of the relationship between various redistributive programs and poverty

This paper utilizes multivariate exogeneity (causality) tests to analyze the relationship between various income policy programs and the poverty rate. The framework we develop allows us to make a distinction between intended poverty reduction objectives and automatic stabilizing behavior. Since we find that the poverty in a given year affects the funding of social programs in later years, we conclude that these programs are primarily acting as automatic stabilizers (i.e., the poverty reduction instruments do not appear to have been implemented with a relentless intent to reduce poverty, a result consistent with Tullock's [1983, 1986] theorem).     

Principled atheism in the Buddhist scholastic tradition

Conclusion The doctrine that there is no permanent creator who superintends creation and takes care of his creatures accords quite well with each of the principles known as the four noble truths of Buddhism. The first truth, that distress is universal, is traditionally expounded in terms of the impermanence of all features of experience and in terms of the absence of genuine unity or personal identity in the multitude of physical and mental factors that constitute what we experience as a single person. As we saw above, the principal Buddhist arguments against the existence of God focus on the impossibility of permanence and unity in the causal structure of the universe. The second noble truth, that distress is the outcome of one's own unrealistic aspirations, is traditionally seen as ruling out the erroneous view that distress is something inflicted upon creatures by a cosmic superintendent or by other circumstances completely beyond their control. The third noble truth, that distress can be eliminated by divesting oneself of all unrealistic aspirations, rules out the view that sentient beings, as powerless victims of a divine will, have no alternative to a life of constant frustration. And the fourth noble truth, that the best means of removing unrealistic desires is to follow a methodical course of self-discipline, counters the view that the road to happiness lies in obedience to divine will or in trying to manipulate the sentiments of a cosmic intelligence through prayer or ritual.     

Intimate Partner Victimization and Depressive Symptoms: Approaching Causal Inference Using a Longitudinal Twin Design

Journal of Quantitative Criminology - While a wealth of research reports a robust association between intimate partner victimization and depression, the relationship has not been tested using...     

Measuring the impact of community development block grant spending on urban neighborhoods

Abstract

Regression analysis of Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) spending in 17 large cities reveals strong statistical associations between spending from 1994 to 1996 and changes in three indicators of neighborhood conditions: the home purchase mortgage approval rate, the median amount of the home purchase loans originated, and the number of businesses. However, there is no consistent association between spending and indicators of subsequent neighborhood change unless CDBG spending is sufficiently spatially targeted that it exceeds a threshold of the sample mean expenditure and is measured relative to the number of poor residents. In addition, associations vary according to neighborhood trajectories before investment and changes in the local economy.

Nevertheless, even in the least hospitable contexts—highly concentrated neighborhood poverty, preexisting declines in home values, weak city job growth—our estimates are consistent with the hypothesis that above‐threshold CDBG spending produces significant neighborhood improvements. We discuss the implications for such spatially targeted spending and connections between our work and the emerging literature on the dynamics of poor neighborhoods.     

Ideology and Polarization Among Women State Legislators

In early work on women in Congress, scholars consistently identified a tendency among women legislators to be more liberal roll‐call voters than male copartisans. Recent changes in Congress point to the polarization of women, where Democratic women remain more liberal than Democratic men but Republican women are no different from, or more conservative than, Republican men. We use newly available state legislative roll‐call data to determine whether women state legislators are more liberal or polarized than male copartisans. We find that while Democratic women state legislators remain consistently more liberal than male copartisans in most state chambers, Republican women legislators are growing more conservative. Thus, women state legislators are increasingly polarized in most U.S. states. Legislator replacement and increasing polarization among state legislators in office contribute to this effect. We argue that polarization among women legislators has implications for the representation of women in the states.