Politics, Altruism, and the Definition of Poverty

The history of poverty lines suggests that they are determined jointly with poverty policy in the same political game. If the definition of poverty is endogenous, however, why do altruistic voters allow poverty to persist indefinitely, as seems to be the case in real life? A simple redistribution model shows that the persistence of poverty imposes fairly strong restrictions on the nature of voter altruism. Specifically, a voter's compassion for the poor must rise as the defined severity of the poverty problem worsens. Given such preferences, political actors face incentives to define poverty as a severe problem and then to use redistribution to reduce it significantly. There is no direct incentive to eliminate poverty, however; indeed, voters may prefer a state in which policy always attacks poverty vigorously and yet never defeats it. It follows that social policy should not be judged by its success in eliminating poverty, which may be directly counter to voter interests and therefore practically impossible. Rather, we should ask whether poverty policy provides enough help to people whom voters currently consider to be poor.     

The Investigation and Trial of Criminal Offences in the New Century – The Need for a Radical Change

This is the text of the Liverpool Law Review Annual Lecture 1999. Mr. Justice Hooper speaks about the need for a radical reform of the practices and procedures and rules of evidence in the Criminal Courts in England and Wales. Radical reform is needed at all stages of the process including the investigation stage, the pre-trial stage and at the trial itself. Substantive law reform is also long overdue and there is a real need to consider a new approach by the adoption of a comprehensive criminal code. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Sex differences in sex-role conceptions and family orientation of high school students

Studies of college freshmen find that men are more sexist in their attitudes than women. Does this hold also for high school students? This paper reports the relationship of (1) sex-role attitudes to selected school and family characteristics and (2) attitudes toward family life to sex-role conceptions for women and men. The study is based on 529 students in grades 9 to 12 attending four high schools. The findings show that males are more sexist than females and Blacks more so than Whites. Women who are bright, from upper class backgrounds, and whose mothers work are more equalitarian in sex-role conceptions. For men, family background is unimportant, but attending an elite public school seems to foster equalitarian sex-role conceptions. Men's sex-role attitudes are harder to explain than women's, and, unlike women, their role attitudes have little connection to their family orientation.