The effectiveness of licensing

Suggesting that licensing may not only fail to accomplish its intended purpose, but may be counterproductive, the author asserts that licensing may not improve the quality of professional services, that licensing boards fail to discipline unethical or incompetent practitioners, and that actions taken against the unlicensed are more often aimed at eliminating competition, not incompetence. In addition, licensing laws may have negative side effects, including an increase in the cost of professional services, the creation of shortages and maldistributions in supply, ineffective use of paraprofessionals, and impediments to needed reforms in education, training, and services. He concludes that equally effective alternatives may be available that are less expensive and have less negative impact, and advocates a system of registration for all practitioners, as well as making other suggestions to improve the overall functioning of licensing boards. Finally, because of political realities, the author proposes a compromise between his ideal model and the current system.     

The Polish Shipyard: Myth,Economic History and Economic Policy Reform in New Zealand*

The New Zealand economy before the election of the Fourth Labour Government in 1984 is often portrayed as something not only highly regulated — but as something uniquely so amongst developed nations, with a stagnant economy declining in the post‐war era and nearing collapse by the 1984 election — the Polish shipyard. We show that New Zealand was not overly‐regulated by the standards of the time, with many of its policies reflecting development elsewhere; it was generally liberalising in the post‐war era and its economic decline and supposed collapse have been considerably overstated. This invented history gave impetus to radical economic reform after 1984 by framing the apparently failed and bizarre past as forcing inevitable solutions. It is an important constraint on policy‐making in New Zealand, allowing policy to develop only along certain “appropriate” paths. It provided cohesion for policy makers in the face of less than certain results and harnessed emotional and intellectual energy towards the free‐market quest, while legitimating certain policy directions and de‐legitimating others.     

The Failure of Trust-Based Retributivism

Law and Philosophy -     

The Interplay Between Greed,Efficiency, and Fairness in Public-Goods Dilemmas

The Greed–Efficiency–Fairness hypothesis (H. A. M. Wilke, In European Review of Social Psychology, Wiley, New York, Vol. 2, pp. 165–187, 1991) states that people in resource dilemmas are greedy and wish to defect, but that greed is constrained by preferences for efficient resource use and fair distributions. This paper reviews research where the GEF hypothesis was generalized to public-goods dilemmas. Results from both surveys and experiments on people's willingness to contribute to resources for social services were interpreted in light of the GEF hypothesis. Whereas earlier research on social dilemmas and fairness considerations have focused on the correlation between estimated fair and actual cooperation rates, the present results provide an extension where cooperation rates are influenced by perceived fairness of how a resource is distributed. Two experiments contribute further insights into the interplay, in terms of effects on cooperation, between greed, efficiency, and fairness. The collective consequences of individual choices were either highlighted or not (Experiment 1) and the outcome structure in prior social dilemma tasks was either collectively or individually framed (Experiment 2). These manipulations influenced (a) cooperation rates and (b) the extent to which decisions were based on greed, efficiency, or fairness.     

Immigration and the emergence of right-wing violence in unified Germany

The articles that make up this special issue were all derived from presentations at a conference that took place at the Pennsylvania State University in the Fall of 1993. This paper presents an overview of the themes and issues discussed at that conference. While the conference was broadly international, co-sponsored by Penn State University and the Max-Planck-Institut and supported financially by the DAAD, the articles included in this special issue focus principally on the nature and amount of hate crimes and xenophobia in Germany. This article describes the international and comparative nature of the conference and explains the decision to focus on the German situation.     

Reflections of a bourgeois Menshevik

He is author of The End of Ideology; The Radical Right; The Coming of Post-Industrial Society; The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism;and The Social Sciences since World War Two.