In remembrance of Robert D. Tollison

We discuss the mechanisms related to quadratic voting, from Vickrey’s counter-speculation mechanism and his second-price auction, through the family of Groves mechanisms and its most notable member, the Clarke mechanism, to the expected externality mechanism, Goeree and Zhang’s mechanism, the Groves–Ledyard mechanism, and the Hylland–Zeckhauser mechanism. We show that each mechanism that involves collective decisions has a quadratic aspect and that all of the mechanisms that we discuss are applications of the fundamental insight that for a process to be efficient, all parties involved must bear the marginal social costs of their actions.     

Doing Nothing is Sometimes Worse: Comparing Avoidant versus Approach Coping Strategies with Peer Victimization and Their Association to Depression and Suicide Ideation

ABSTRACT

Peer victimization is a major stressor adolescents often face in the school environment, and has been linked to depression and suicidal risk. This study analyzed the associations between three behavioral coping strategies (avoidance, seeking social support from adults/peers, and retaliation) and depression and suicidal ideation. Participants included 4,254 victimized students who were part of the Saving and Empowering Young Lives in Europe (SEYLE) study that compared three school-based prevention interventions and collected information on health risk behaviors in adolescents from 11 European countries. Results showed behavioral avoidance to be associated with an increase in levels of depression, as compared to the other coping strategies (adult social support, peer social support, retaliation). Seeking social support from adults was associated with lower depression and suicidal ideation rates. A more than 25% increase in suicidal ideation was associated with behavioral avoidance, compared to seeking social support from adults. By contrast, retaliation to peer victimization was not found to be associated with increased depression or suicidal ideation. The findings support the Coping Deficit model and may suggest that abstaining by doing nothing when victimized can be associated with certain adverse emotional outcomes.     

The Anti-Axial Age

Karl Jaspers famously characterized the period from the beginning of the eighth to the end of the third century before Christ as an “Axial Age” in which intellectual freedom and creativity blossomed as never before. This article argues that it was followed, five hundred years later, by an “Anti-Axial Age”, which devised a novel formula for intellectual and political repression. Its essence was the state’s capture of the millenial narrative, which had first been developed as religious doctrine within Zoroastrianism and Christianity. Involving the two great classical empires of Western Eurasia, Persia and Rome, and then empowering the expansion of Islam, the Anti-Axial Age left an ideological legacy that continues to haunt the contemporary world.     

Police Perceptions of Irrational Unstable Behaviours and Use of Force

Police identification of people experiencing mental illness is usually based on either the person having an official contact history with police or through observing behavioural indicators commonly associated with mental illness during an encounter. Police have voiced concerns with their ability to identify and respond to people experiencing mental illness in a timely way and report that they commonly resort to more coercive tactical options to resolve encounters. The present study employed a mixed method design to examine 286 police use of force incidents to investigate the association between force used on and by offenders displaying irrational-unstable behavioural characteristics. The irrational-unstable offenders were two times more likely to be perceived by police to have an apparent mental disorder and almost four times more likely to have a known mental health history; one in six had an official record of contact with mental health services. There were few differences in police and offender use of force, considering force as both a categorical and a continuous variable, while incident-level comparisons suggested that police force was generally proportional to offender resistance. Implications are discussed in terms of the need to redress limitations with the traditional police approach style.     

On Jordan Peterson,Postmodernism, and PoMo-Bashing

Jordan Peterson says that postmodernists say no interpretation is better than another. I would no sooner identify Peterson’s adversaries as those who have been misled by “postmodernism” than I would identify them as misled by “sustainability,” “diversity,” “multiculturalism,” or “intersectionality.” Such fare is mainly symptomatic. “Postmodern” invocations are often like “sustainability” invocations: inessential. This piece is not a defense of postmodernism. It is a critique of PoMo-bashing.