Policy design and public support for carbon tax: Evidence from a 2018 US national online survey experiment

Public support for policy instruments is influenced by perceptions of how benefits and costs are distributed across various groups. We examine different carbon tax designs outlining different ways to distribute tax revenues. Using a national online sample of 1,606 US respondents, we examine support for a $20/ton carbon tax that is: (1) revenue neutral: revenue is returned to citizens via tax cuts; (2) compensation-focused: revenue is directed to helping actors disproportionately hurt by the tax; (3) mitigation-focused: revenue funds projects reducing carbon emissions; and (4) adaptation-focused: revenue is directed to enhancing community resilience to extreme weather events. We find devoting revenue to mitigation raises overall support for carbon tax by 6.3 per cent versus the control (54.9 per cent) where no information on spending is provided. Other frames raise support in specific subgroups only. Revenue neutrality raises support among lower-income households (+6.6 per cent) and political independents (+9.4 per cent), while compensation increases support among lower-income repondents (+6.1 per cent).     

Book review

This article looks at the vast contributions political philosopher Hal Pepinsky has made to effecting a peaceful, needs‐meeting vision of justice in the academic fields of criminology and criminal justice over the past three decades. The article examines his life's work as reflected in his most recent book, Peacemaking: Reflections of a Radical Criminologist. This work demonstrates that those who push the boundaries of scholarly disciplines, such as he has done, sometimes find themselves in conflict with those most invested in controlling the allocation of the rewards those disciplines mete out. As Professor Pepinsky increasingly became an outsider he took the risk of taking on the burdens of other outsiders whose pain and suffering the vast majority of his academic colleagues turned their eyes from.     

Rethinking “Structural Violence”

The concept of structural violence first developed in the 1960s as a way to explain disparities in health and development between wealthy countries and impoverished postcolonial states. This idea emerged out of Dependency Theory and defined poverty and disease in the developing world as the product of exploitation by colonial or neocolonial powers. Contemporary researchers continue to invoke structural violence to explain international health trends, but a review of recent literature reveals that the concept is increasingly outdated and poorly theorized. It is especially problematic when used to describe contemporary epidemics of infectious disease. In this paper I offer a brief overview of the concept of structural violence and critique the way it has been used to explain the political economy of two recent outbreaks: Ebola in West Africa and cholera in Haiti. Ultimately the paper concludes that these scholars claim to be explaining epidemics but instead use their research as a form of moralistic storytelling that leaves the structural dimensions of health unexplored.     

Evidence of incomplete cortical modulation of autonomic responses in 11-to 16-year-old adolescents

This study examines response differentiation in the sympathetically innervated skin conductance response (SCR). Differentiation in such systems has been ascribed to cortical inhibitory control over subcortical autonomic centers. Developmental study of such differentiation thus provides information on cortical development and the maturation of cortical control over subcortical centers. Previous investigators have focused on the simple level of differentiation involved in discriminating response on one side the body from that on the other. In such studies several investigators reported more diffuse response among young children; some reported adultlike differentiation by approximately age 10. The present study examines a more complex instance of differentiation, the quantitative modulation of response from a given site in order to produce SCR amplitudes proportionate to the information value of the eliciting stimulus. Relatively large amplitude SCRs elicited by imperative PRESS-SIGNALS of varying information value were studied, together with smaller SCRs elicited by NONPRESS-SIGNALS also varying in information value, in two adolescent groups, aged 11–16 years, and in a young adult sample. In contrast to earlier work, the present study demonstrates a continuing difference between adolescents and adults. Adults showed consistent differentiation, with SCR amplitude reflecting changes in stimulus information values for both PRESS- and NONPRESS-SIGNALS. Adolescents displayed differentiation only for SCRs elicited by NONPRESS-SIGNALS: Response to PRESS-SIGNALS did not reflect stimulus information values, even though reaction time data demonstrated that PRESS-SIGNAL information was being registered cortically. The degree of cortical control present in these adolescents, enabling them to display differentiated SCRs to NONPRESS-SIGNALS, would likely be sufficient to allow simple left-right discrimination, perhaps accounting for the adultlike reactions previously reported for this age group. The inability of the adolescents to sustain SCR differentiation when large amplitude responses were elicited by the PRESS-SIGNALS might reflect the inability of still immature cortical controls to cope with sizable sympathetic output. A critical level of sympathetic arousal may exist for adolescents in this age range, above which cortical inhibitory controls may become ineffective.This study was supported in part by NIMH Research Grant 15633 to the first author.Received his Ph.D in psychology from the University of Buffalo. Major research interest is psychophysiological correlates of attention in both normal and pathological states.Received his M.D. from the University of California at San Francisco in 1955. Major research interest is cognitive developmental alterations in severely disturbed, retarded, and/ or brain-damaged children and adolescents.