Book review/dangerous offenders and endangered justice

Mark H. Moore, Susan R. Estrich, Daniel McGillis, and William Spelman, Dangerous Offenders: The Elusive Target of Justice Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984, vi + 252 pp.     

Demographic change and industrialization in germany, 1815–1914

This article analyzes demographic change in Bremen 1815–1914 against the background of changing employment opportunities. Within the pre-industrial employment structure, which still prevailed in the decades after 1850, in-migrants were particularly disadvantaged. When modern industries developed, the situation changed. At the beginning of the twentieth century both male and female in-migrants benefited from a higher life expectancy than the city-born population had. The strong sectoral changes in employment opportunities in Bremen at the turn of the century reinforced the trends towards family limitation. More skilled in-migrants felt the need to adapt their reproductive behavior to facilitate upward social mobility. The article argues for a wider use of archival data, like those used in their study, to explore issues relating to urban demographic change in German cities during industrialization.     

Das Dislmminierungsverbot des Artikels 21 GRC aufgrund des Vermögens als verfassungsgesetzlich gewährleistetes Recht

Der VfGH hat entschieden, dass manche Bestimmungen der EU-Grundrechtscharta den verfassungsgesetzlich gewährleisteten Rechten des B-VG gleichzustellen sind. Der Beitrag geht zuerst den Voraussetzungen dieser Gleichstellung nach und zeigt, dass sie bei dem Diskriminierungsverbot des Art 21 GRC erfüllt sind. In der Folge wird das Verbot der Diskriminierung aufgrund des Vermögens etwas beleuchtet. Der Beitrag legt dar, dass "Vermögen" hier als subjektive, positive oder negative, Vermögenslage einer Person zu verstehen ist. In der Folge wird der potentiell sehr weite Anwendungsbereich dieses Verbotes dargelegt.     

Post-Keynesian Public Budgeting & Finance: Assessing Contributions From Modern Monetary Theory

While Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) offers contributions that are worthy of serious consideration, some additional theory-building and synthesis with existing theory may be in order to tie MMT into the established budgeting literature. MMT focuses primarily on monetarily sovereign governments. These are governments that face extremely “soft” budget constraints insofar as they: issue and regulate the value of their own currencies, possess central banks that function as the fiscal agents of their government treasuries, are able to issue sovereign debt denominated in their domestic currency, and operate in a system of freely-floating currency exchange rates, with a minimum of currency and capital controls. National governments that are sovereign according to these criteria are able to make all debt service payments as they come due, virtually without regard to their level of outstanding debt; they cannot be forced to default against their will. They are also macroeconomically-autonomous. It is the collective position of the symposium papers that these conditions describe, in precise terms, the fiscal position of the U.S. federal government. As such, the existence of an ultra-soft U.S. government budget constraint is grounded in the extremely favorable conditions of money and credit that the federal government is subject to, and which in fact it has created and nurtured for itself since the Second World War. An important implication is that the federal level budgeting literature cannot ignore the macroeconomics and the administration of a sovereign currency regime, nor the monetary economics that ungirds it, without sustaining charges of unrealism.