Recent Trends in U.S. Income and Expenditure Poverty

After many years of following similar trends, U.S. poverty rates measured by household spending in data from the U.S. Consumer Expenditure Survey (CE) fell between 2000 and 2008, while poverty measured by income rose. Comparisons of spending and income poverty in the CE with income poverty in other surveys, spending data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, and a time series of employment levels, find the CE to be the outlier. The findings do not bear directly on the primary use of CE data in providing category weights for calculation of the Consumer Price Index, but do require explanation not available in CE public‐use files.     

Full circle: New principals and old consequences in the modern diplomatic system

Originally written for a conference marking the 350th anniversary of the treaties of Westphalia, the article argues that, although the surrounding circumstances are very different, there are some interesting parallels to be drawn between the problems of the early seventeenth century and those of the end of the twentieth. The principal shared characteristic is that power was then and is now on the move between one type of institution and another. This resulted and results in the development of unusually complex relationships between new institutions unfamiliar with each other and a continuing need for them to deal with decaying but surviving entities from the past. In such circumstances both the structures for forming and managing policy and the machinery for conducting relations underwent and are undergoing marked and stressful change, as the old strives to adjust and the successors attempt to construct new and appropriate means of representation. Where the Westphalian period, under the pressure of state formation began the construction of ministries with sole responsibility for foreign affairs, the present period is seeing a corresponding dismantling of the autonomous foreign ministry under the pressure of globalization. In diplomatic services a similar correspondence may be seen: state services decline, but private entities, whether commercial or civil, are beginning to create means of representing themselves both to each other and to national governments: old problems, but new principals.     

Books to review

Abstract

Taken together, these four books provide an intriguing narrative, not just of the significance of gender in social transformation in India, but also of the variety of ways this has been studied and conceived. They are, in many ways, remarkably diverse.     

Democratic babies? Françoise Dolto,Benjamin Spock and the ideology of post-war parenting advice

ABSTRACT

This article looks at the political implications of a subject not always thought of as directly political, but which has an important ideological component: child-rearing advice. The period after 1945 offers an important example of how this topic can interact with developments in political ideology. This article takes the example of France, with substantial comparative reference to the US and Britain. It argues that the mid-twentieth century was characterized by a move from a hygienist and behaviourist approach to child rearing to a more liberal, humanist approach informed by Freudian psychoanalysis. This occurred significantly later in France – in the 1970s – than in Britain or the US, where it is associated with the years immediately after World War II. Through a comparison of two celebrated childcare experts who epitomized the change – Françoise Dolto in France, Benjamin Spock in the US – the paper explores the reasons for this temporal discrepancy. It shows that Anglo-American experts believed that the widespread application of psychoanalytic theory would help produce democratic citizens and ward off the dangers of authoritarian personalities. In France, psychoanalytic approaches became allied with conservative Catholic views of the family and women’s roles, with implications for family policy into the twenty-first century.