The Significance of Statistical Significance:

This essay reviews The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives, by Stephen T. Ziliak and Deirdre N. McCloskey. The book's core message is that statistical significance should not be equated with substantive significance and that empirical researchers should convey more information about the magnitude of relationships and effects than many now do. This essay summarizes, approves of, and elaborates on Ziliak and McCloskey's message with special attention to concerns of the legal academy. It clarifies appropriate uses of significance tests within the research framework of controlling for plausible rival hypotheses.     

Learning, multiple equilibria, and the state: Agriculture’s role

This article will argue that the state must learn to pursue productivity enhancing rather than predatory policies if rapid long-run development is to occur in poor countries. These productivity enhancing strategies will most likely involve investment coordination. However, such coordination of investment in manufacturing is likely to fail in less developed countries as a result of low productivity in the traditional, agricultural sector. More importantly, investment coordination in agriculture is more likely to be successful especially if this is a broad based investment strategy involving the bulk of the population. In this context, the state will learn effective policies for coordinating development. Alternatively, if the agricultural sector is ignored and productivity here remains low, investment coordination in manufacturing will likely fail, and the state will learn to become a predator. Richard Grabowski is professor of economics at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale     

Destructive Competition or Competition Destroyed? Regulatory Theory and the History of Irish Road Transportation Legislation

The principal aim of our study is to contribute to the debate over whether regulation is enacted in the interest of consumers, producers, political agents, or some combination of these. We examine the legislative debates and subsequent regulatory bills surrounding road transportation regulation in Ireland in light of the three dominant theories which purport to explain the existence of regulation: the public interest theory and the so-called Chicago and Virginia theories. A unique feature of our study is an attempt to integrate specific rhetorical concepts used in the public policy debates into the theoretical analysis of regulation. One noteworthy conclusion of our study is that theories of economic processes affect the shaping and results of public policy.     

I Blog Therefore I Am

Twenty-five years since the publication of Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity, this essay reflects on the extraordinary changes in the nature of celebrity, including its radical democratization by way of the internet. Such changes reflect old dilemmas and pose new challenges as the internet and publishing worlds begin to merge and print culture is left behind.     

Labour's Transformation: A Staged Process with No Single Point of Origin

Looking for one specific point of origin of the far reaching transformation of the Labour Party obscures rather than illuminates the complex process which lies behind its ideological self-redefinition. This response to Adam Lent's article in Politics Volume 17, 'Labour's Transformation: Searching for the Point of Origin', argues that the long march from the party of Michael Foot to that led by Tony Blair is more usefully explored in terms of a gradual, staged process. This transformation, evidenced in alterations in Labour's programmatic stance, electoral strategy and stated political objectives, was enacted in the period 1983–1997 as a whole. While several significant 'moments of transition' can be identified none are by themselves a single 'point of origin'.     

Occupational Class and Vote in the 1949 Norwegian Election. Research Note

In 1948–49 the Sociology Office of the University of Oslo, under the guidance of Prof. Paul Lazarsfeld of Columbia University, initiated a series of studies on the Norwegian economic planning system. Part of this Planning Project was a national election survey in the fall of 1949, on a modified probability sample of 2600 people. The results show the paramount influence of economic class on voting, interpreting class as a combination of employer/employee relationship, property ownership, prestige-status, and income. Indicators of the homogeneity of class environment also played a role. Given the occupational structure of Norway, the Labor party had to win over part of the non-working-class population to obtain control of the government. They did this by winning about 1/3 of the white-collar vote, and about 1/4 of the farmers and fishermen. The policies of economic stabilization - control of inflation through price controls, wage controls, food subsidies, and rationing, and maintenance of full employment under conditions of "suppressed inflation" - were crucial to winning over these white-collar and farm voters.