Aids outreach

Frank Espada is a documentary photographer who received international recognition for his Puerto Rican Diaspora Documentary Project, a traveling photographic and oral history that has been displayed in over 28 cities since 1982. The exhibit will soon be published as a book by Temple University Press.     

Tax policy as social policy: cafeteria plans, 1978-1985

Since the passage of Section 125 of the Internal Revenue Code in 1978, cafeteria plans have offered employees a choice of tax-free fringe benefits. Although these plans have been popular with employers and employees, Treasury Department officials and many tax lawyers soon came to regard Section 125 as a mistake. The Treasury has tried to reclaim through regulation the revenue and the fundamental principles of tax law it had asked Congress to give away in 1978. This paper is a history of Section 125 that emphasizes its relationship to health policy. On the basis of interviews and printed primary sources, the paper argues that Treasury officials made a less than rigorous assessment of the impact of cafeteria plans because they were preoccupied with a larger agenda of making tax-free benefits more equitable. Moreover, they saw no reason to collaborate with the health policy community to plan this agenda; they saw themselves as implementing a social policy already in the Internal Revenue Code.     

From science to survival

He has written widely in his field and is author of The Search for Society; The Violent Imagination; The Red Lamp of Incest; Kinship and Marriage; Encounter with Anthropology,and co-author of The Imperial Animal.(with Lionel Tiger). This is an abridged version of the author’s new introduction to Encounter with Anthropology,to be published by Transaction.     

A measure of skewness in offense distributions

It has become a criminological fact of life that a small group of offenders is responsible for a far greater share of offending than its size would suggest. For example, it is well known that in the 1945 Philadelphia birth cohort, 6% of the cohort members committed 52% of the offenses. We argue, however, that the conventional percentaging approach to measuring skewness in offense distributions is inadequate. We propose and apply an alternative approach to measuring offense skewness which utilizes the offense distribution to its fullest and can easily and meaningfully be used for comparisons across or within study populations.