Through a glass darkly: Cause and effect in refugee resettlement policies

As the ongoing debate among philosophers and social scientists suggests, interpretation of cause and effect in human action is often extremely difficult. Especially complicated for the policy analyst is the problem of determining whether causal relationships are inferred from the evidence or imputed to it. This dilemma characterizes certain types of government activity in which distinctions between policy and implementation, between decisions and actions, and between inputs and outcomes are unclear. The efforts of the federal government between 1960 and 1985 to assist refugees in securing employment illustrate how the flow of events may elude causal explanation, and how conclusions and recommendation for improvement derived from the evidence may prove highly ambiguous. In such instances the most rational course open to policy analysts may be to concede ignorance.     

Shakespeare,procreation, and progress

His books include The Economics of Population Growth; The Ultimate Resource; Theory of Population and Economic Growth: Effort, Opportunity and Wealth; The Economic Consequences of Immigration;and most recently Population Matters: People, Resources, Environment and Immigration,published by Transaction.     

An economic model of social sensitivity: The case of individual criminal behavior

In general, economists have modeled criminal behavior as a problem in time allocation under uncertainty. Their Friedman-Savage utility models have been based on the binomial probability distribution and then tested using aggregate data on crime rates and neglect the nonpecuniary aspects of crime. This paper overcomes the shortcomings of previous work. Specifically, criminal activity is modeled with an underlying geometric probability process and explicitly accounts for the moral and social compromise involved in becoming a criminal. The empirical model enables the quantification of the criminal's moral and social sensitivity using data based on a consolidated file of police records and a cohort survey of criminals and noncriminals. On the basis of this unique data set, it is found that the included individual criminals are risk averse and that gang membership reduces social sensitivity.