Gore Vidal’s Anti-Jewish nationalism

Edward Alexander is professor of English at the University of Washington and at Tel Aviv University in Israel. He is author of, among other works, Matthew Arnold and John Stuart Mill; The Resonance of Dust; Isaac Bashevis Singer;and, most recently. The Jewish Idea and Its Enemies.     

Chilling prostate cancer

Patients rave about a new treatment. Some doctors are less sure.     

Risk aversion and rent-seeking: An extension and some experimental evidence

Theoretical investigations indicate that the risk attitudes of individuals will effect the amount of rent that can be assumed to be dissipated by rent-seeking activities. Following this line of investigation we extend Hillman and Katz's work to a small numbers case and demonstrate that the degree to which a monopoly rent is dissipated is dependent upon the structure of the risk attitudes of two risk averse individuals.Our earlier laboratory results were evaluated with respect to the risk neutral Cournot-Nash predictions. However, given the uncertainty present in the rent-seeking experiment, our ability to reject these risk neutral predictions may not be, in fact, a failure for the model but a result of risk aversion. In laboratory experiments in which we control for the relative risk attitudes of individual agents, we show that risk aversion matters. The relative risk aversion of individuals affects the level of rent-seeking activity and the extent to which rents are dissipated. In our experiments, the relatively less risk averse individuals dissipated relatively more rent.     

Developing the relevance potentialities of national security and foreign policy research: Some proposed criteria

While effective foreign and national security policy-making increasingly requires research that is produced outside government, little is known about how such research affects the actions of policy-makers, or why it may or may not be policy-relevant to them. This essay poses a number of criteria which can be used to weigh the policy relevance of applied social science research for national security and foreign policy issues. These criteria can be divided into content and process categories, the former including aspects of time, issue salience, format, and confidence; and the latter incorporating questions related to the origin of research, the strategy which informs it, and the tactics by which it is presented. Hopefully, such criteria can be applied to existing works, serve as guidelines for future research, and perhaps illuminate the general role of social knowledge in policy formulation.The authors wish to express their appreciation for the opportunity to participate in the National Security Education Seminar held at Colorado College, Colorado Springs, Colorado, June 18–July13, 1973, directed by Fred A. Sondermann and conducted under the auspices of the National Security Program, New York University, Frank N. Trager, Director. This paper is a revised version of a report originally prepared for the seminar. The views presented here are those of the authors, and not necessarily of any of the institutions with which they are associated.     

The KwaZulu/Natal Indaba: A Federalist Proposal for South Africa

In Durban, South Africa, delegates from South Africa's politicalcenter proposed a federal solution to apartheid. Called theKwaZulu/Natal "Indaba," the plan proposes to merge two hithertosegregated jurisdictions and to bring majority rule to at leastone province of South Africa. The system envisioned by the planincludes a bicameral legislature, a consociational cabinet,proportional representation, minority veto over certain legislation,a segmented representative chamber, and enforcement of a comprehensiveBill of Rights. The "KwaNatal" plan also calls for a substantialdevolution of power, including the right of the provincial legislatureto repeal acts of Parliament that invade areas of provincialcompetence. This determination to extend local, multiracialautonomy put Natal officials on a collision course with thecentral government at Pretoria, which is trying to eliminatethe elected provincial governments.