Penal Excess and Surplus Meaning: Public Torture Lynchings in Twentieth-Century America

The most notorious lynchings that occurred in the United States between 1890 and 1940 involved publicity, crowds, ritual, and abnormal cruelty. Several hundred of these "public torture lynchings" took place, most of them in the Deep South. The author develops an interpretation that takes seriously the specific forms and discourses that lynchers and their supporters used to describe and justify these events—characterizing them as criminal punishments, albeit summary, informal ones that were shaped by a white supremacist culture and a politics of racial domination. An interpretation of the penal context and meanings of these public torture lynchings helps us understand their specific forms and their claims to legitimacy. The penal character of these lynchings increased the probability that they would be tolerated by local (and even national) audiences and thus made them a strategic form of violence in struggles to maintain racial supremacy. The author argues that a consideration of these events should lead us to revise our standard narratives about the evolution of modern punishments.     

Court Awards of Damages for Loss of Future Earnings: An Empirical Study and an Alternative Method of Calculation

This article examines the effect upon damages for personal injury of methods used in the United States of America to calculate loss of future earnings. The work of lawyers is examined from the perspective of labour economists. The damages calculated by using these alternative methods are compared with those actually awarded in over a hundred cases determined by courts in England and Wales. This interdisciplinary and comparative study reveals that the tort system fails to satisfy one of its main objectives in that it does not provide recipients of damages with 'full' compensation.     

US Military and Economic Intervention in an International Context of Low-intensity Conflict

Recent major shifts in US military thinking, creating a new low-intensity conflict (LIC) doctrine, have resulted already in significant changes in organization, mission definition, force structure and budgetary allocation. These changes have come about because American leadership recognizes that the process of deindustrialization has produced a vulnerable, highly integrated and interdependent global economic system. This system of economic rationalization is susceptible to anti-western disruptions because of the instability produced by rapid social change, a consequence of the competition from the newly industrialized nations. LIC capability is viewed as a necessary means for dealing with disruptions.     

Reassessing the Effect of Economic Growth on Well-being in Less-developed Countries, 1980–2003

Development debates have been greatly influenced by the growth consensus: the conventional wisdom that economic growth should be the primary priority for less-developed countries (LDCs) because it most effectively improves the well-being of the world’s poor. We compare the impact of growth to other independent variables in an unbalanced panel analysis of up to 109 LDCs and 580 observations across six time points (1980, 1985, 1990, 1995, 2000, and 2003). Our dependent variables include caloric consumption, infant survival probability, one-to-five year survival probability, female life expectancy, and male life expectancy. First, we find that gross domestic product (GDP) has significant positive effects on caloric consumption, female life expectancy, and male life expectancy. Second, GDP does not have robust effects on infant and one-to-five survival probabilities. Third, fertility, urbanization, and secondary school enrollment have larger effects than GDP in the majority of models. The more powerful effects of fertility, urbanization, and secondary schooling cannot simply be attributed to an indirect effect of GDP. Fourth, we find that dependency variables do not have robust significant effects. Fifth, over time, GDP has become much less effective at improving caloric consumption and infant and one-to-five survival. We infer that there are serious limitations to concentrating exclusively on economic growth to improve well-being in LDCs.     

Managing the Environment: Rhetoric, Policy and Reality

This article argues that, despite environmental issues climbing higher on the political agenda and considerable recent policy activity, rhetoric is not matched by reality in our efforts to manage the Australian environment. We integrate the imperatives emerging from the policy and sustainability literatures and from actual policy, with detailed work on wildlife conservation in Victoria's Central Highlands. Our analysis demonstrates that, rather than undertaking the more intensive policy and 'adaptive management' that is needed, governments are often doing less and may actually be 'taking their hands of their wheel'. Some public policy and administration implications of the emerging policy field of sustainability are illustrated.