Endogenous competence and a limit to the Condorcet Jury Theorem

We describe and compare the experiences of academic exclusion of Alexander Del Mar, J.A. Hobson, and Gordon Tullock. While aspects of the circumstances differed, a common element was academic exclusion because of challenges to mainstream views. Alexander Del Mar, J.A. Hobson, and Gordon Tullock were in due course recognized for the originality and merit of their contributions, although each incurred personal costs because of the exclusion by the academic elites of their time. Our study takes us into the role of ideologically based prejudice in judgment of the worthiness of economic ideas.     

LOOKING BEYOND THE CORONAVIRUS

Lessons from the epidemic likely to lead to government action on multiple fronts The novel coronavirus is dominating the 2020 global news cycle.The virus has reached more than 110 countries and regions,killed over 4,000 people.     

How Early Stressful Life Experiences Combine With Adolescents’ Conjoint Health Risk Trajectories to Influence Cardiometabolic Disease Risk in Young Adulthood

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Research has primarily focused on additive (unique) associations between early stressful life experiences (specifically, socioeconomic adversity and maltreatment)...     

A Cross-cultural Validation of the Brief Child Abuse Potential Inventory (BCAP)

The aim of this study was to provide preliminary findings on the cross-cultural validation and reliability of the Brief Child Abuse Potential Inventory (BCAP) developed by Ondersma et al. (Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, 2005). A community sample of 324 parents was recruited through schools from a range of socioeconomic areas in a large UK city. The BCAP appears to be a reliable instrument that is easy to use and shows promise as a brief screening tool for parental child abuse potential within the UK. Modifications are suggested to the validity scales and the conceptual structure based on this sample, however, detailed testing of the utility of this scale for clinical practice outside the US should be pursued.     

An Examination of the Influence of Strength of Evidence Variables in the Prosecution’s Decision to Dismiss Driving While Intoxicated Cases

The majority of research examining prosecutorial discretion has focused on legal factors such as the seriousness of the offense or the extra-legal characteristics of the accused including race/ethnicity and gender. The amount of variance explained by court researchers, however, remains quite low. The present study extends previous research examining the primary determinants of prosecutor??s decision to dismiss or fully prosecute focusing on driving while intoxicated cases. We focus on the predictive contribution of the strength of evidence relative to legal and extra-legal variables. The data consist of 2,358 driving while intoxicated cases filed in Harris County, Texas during the first 8?months of 1999. The findings strongly support the inclusion of strength of evidence variables in court research and further suggest their past omission may have attributed significance to spurious relationships.     

Parallel narratives: resistance strategies of low-wage female hospitality workers and nineteenth-century black enslaved females

This research explores control and gendered resistance strategies of female low-level hospitality workers and nineteenth-century black enslaved females by linking resistance patterns in historically documented slave narratives with oral narratives of current female hospitality workers. Emerging narratives document parallel stories of oppression, abuse, devaluation, and exploitation and focus awareness on the subordinate position of low-level workers in an oppressor/oppressed relationship. Functioning under two different economic systems, slavery and capitalism, these low-level workers’ narratives allow similar patterns of resistance to surface and help us expand our understanding of worker exploitation, female resistance, and narrative as possessing liberatory potential.     

Explaining the Association between Early Adversity and Young Adults’ Diabetes Outcomes: Physiological,Psychological, and Behavioral Mechanisms

Previous studies have documented that early adversity increases young adults’ risk for diabetes resulting in morbidity and comorbidity with adverse health conditions. However, less is known about how inter-related physiological (e.g., body mass index [BMI]), psychological (e.g., depressive symptoms), and behavioral mechanisms (e.g., unhealthy eating and sedentary behavior) link early adversity to young adults’ diabetes outcomes, although these mechanisms appear to stem from early stressful experiences. The current study tested the patterning of these longitudinal pathways leading to young adults’ diabetes using a nationally representative sample of 13,286 adolescents (54% female) over a period of 13 years. The findings indicated that early adversity contributed to elevated BMI, depressive symptoms, and stress-related health behaviors. The impact of these linking mechanisms on hierarchical diabetes outcomes (i.e., prediabetes and diabetes) remained significant after taking their associations with each other into account, showing that these mechanisms operate concurrently. The findings emphasize the importance of early detection for risk factors of young adults’ diabetes in order to minimize their detrimental health effects.