Subjected to Sanitation: Caste Relations and Sanitation Adoption in Rural Tamil Nadu

If solving the global sanitation crisis lies within Indian borders, then it is important to understand the influence of caste relations on sanitation building and usage. Our ethnography investigated three villages in rural Tamil Nadu where seven separate sanitation interventions had failed. The analysis indicates caste relations played a key role in the failed interventions by creating and reinforcing the means by which caste groups distinguished themselves from each other at the village scale. Issues of cleaning, access to subsidies, latrine design, and purity served to facilitate and limit the processes that enable the everyday, unequal relationships of caste.     

Public Capital Investment and Economic Growth in Forth Worth: The Implications for Public Budgeting and Infrastructure Management

There is a common assumption that local government investment in infrastructure stimulates private development. This article examines relationships in one southwestern city between public capital spending and city infrastructure assets and private economic activity as measured by building permit activity, permit values, and assessed property valuations. Two research questions are examined: (1) Is public investment in new capital associated with private capital formation? and (2) Is public investment associated with improvements in the property tax base? The findings hold implications for infrastructure planning, budgeting, and management. First, public and private capital spending patterns varied in tandem across several cycles, and tracking such cycles may help public managers predict short- and mid-term infrastructure needs. Second, utility capital spending is critically related to private capital formation, and may offer higher fiscal returns than other public infrastructure. Third, infrastructure capital had a strong significant effect on the assessed value of urban property, and will therefore influence the property tax base.     

General interest and redistribution with self-interested voters: Social contract revisited

I provide a rational solution to the lasting paradox that citizens be more concerned with “general interest” than most economic agents. I show who that, in the face of fundamental political uncertainty, the social contract, as conceptualized by Jean-Jacques Rousseau two centuries ago, provides to self-interested voters an effective mechanism of self-insurance that limits amount of involuntary transfers. My positive theory of voter behavior and general interest has but a formal resemblance with the normative theory of welfare judgments and social justice. Even when the efficiency aspects of redistribution are not considered, there is no way in which the final distribution of incomes could be equal if the initial distribution of incomes were unequal! The role of political parties in this model is to manipulate the distribution of political chances in order to maximize their probability of winning elections. I show for instance that “social instability” and progressive redistribution characterize the equilibrium outcome of a two-class democracy in which the lower class forms a majority.     

Morality and philanthropy

Samuel Lipman is publisher of The New Criterionand music critic for Commentary.He has written widely on classical music as well as on contemporary painting.