Capgras syndrome and dangerousness

This article discusses Capgras syndrome and its association with harmful and potentially harmful behaviors. Phenomenological and psychodynamic analysis of a series of cases will highlight danger signals that may be present in Capgras patients.     

The impact of court errors on liability sharing and safety regulation for environmental/industrial accidents

We focus in this paper on the effects of court errors on the optimal sharing of liability between firms and financiers, as an environmental policy instrument. Using a structural model of the interactions between firms, financial institutions, governments and courts we show, through numerical simulations, the distortions in liability sharing between firms and financiers that the imperfect implementation of government policies implies. We consider in particular the role played by the efficiency of the courts in jointly avoiding Type I (finding an innocent firm guilty of inappropriate care) and Type II (finding a guilty firm not guilty of inappropriate care) errors. This role is considered in a context where liability sharing is already distorted (when compared with first best values) due not only to the courts’ own imperfect assessment of safety care levels exerted by firms but also to the presence of moral hazard and adverse selection in financial contracting. There is also not congruence of objectives between firms and financiers on the one hand and social welfare maximization on the other. Our results indicate that an increase in the efficiency of court system in avoiding errors raises safety care level, thereby reducing the probability of accident, and allowing the social welfare maximizing government to impose a lower liability [higher] share for firms [financiers] as well as a lower standard level of care.     

Public–Private Partnerships and the Public Accountability Question

Public–private partnerships (PPPs) are growing in popularity as a governing model for delivery of public goods and services. PPPs have existed since the Roman Empire, but their expansion into traditional public projects today raises serious questions about public accountability. This article examines public accountability and its application to government and private firms involved in PPPs. An analytical framework is proposed for assessing the extent to which PPPs provide (or will provide) goods and services consistent with public sector goals of effectiveness, efficiency, and equity. Six dimensions—risk, costs and benefits, political and social impacts, expertise, collaboration, and performance measurement—are incorporated into a model that assists public managers in improving partnerships’ public accountability.     

Cohousing For Whom? Survey Evidence to Support the Diffusion of Socially and Spatially Integrated Housing in the United States

Cohousing is a resident-led neighborhood development model that clusters private dwelling units around collectively owned and managed spaces, with potential to address long-term social and environmental challenges in American metropolitan regions. To date, however, the cohousing model has been slow to diffuse beyond a demographically narrow following. This limited following may signal to policymakers that cohousing is an unappealing housing model, and therefore an impractical policy objective. Drawing from a survey of 1,000 American residents, the results of a multivariate regression model suggest that (a) many of the characteristics of the current resident population of cohousing in the United States have no statistical association with the individuals who indicate interest in cohousing nationwide; (b) other characteristics serve as better predictors of interest in cohousing; and therefore (c) the slow diffusion of cohousing is likely the consequence of inaccessibility rather than low appeal. Overcoming these challenges demands shifts in policy.     

Correspondence

The viability and desirability of a finance-led growth regime is first assessed against the historical evidence about the many alternative regimes that have been proposed as successors to Fordism. A purely hypothetical model is then built by assembling various hypotheses derived from the observation of current American trends. The imposition of financial norms, such as shareholder value, requires a new and coherent architecture for the mode of governance of firms, the form of competition, the wage labour nexus and the objectives of monetary policy, public budget and tax system. According to the model, any requirement for increased profit has a variable macro-economic impact on wages and economic activity according to the size of accelerator effects and the relative importance of wage and profit in income formation. The stability of an equity-based regime depends on monetary policy which controls financial bubbles and thus the diffusion of finance may push the economy into a zone of structural instability. The next major financial crisis may originate in the USA whose economy approximates most closely to the model. But, the so-called American 'new economy' combines diverse but interdependent structural transformations: diffusion of Information and Communication Technologies, search for new rules for competition, increased flexibility in wages and employment, shift from manufacturing to services. Finance is an element in, but not the whole of, this complex emerging regime.     

‘We are Like the Living Dead’: Farmer Suicides in Maharashtra,Western India

Findings presented here about farmer suicides in Amravati and Yavatmal districts, Maharashtra, are evaluated in relation to Durkheimian theory, which attributes such acts to an historically specific combination of social and economic causes. Lower and middle caste peasant smallholders found themselves trapped between enhanced aspirations generated by land reform and other post-1947 measures, and the reality of neoliberalism (rising debt, declining income). Suicides among large and medium farmers belonging to the higher castes in Maharashtra were occasioned by failures in business, trade and politics. Such cases are consistent with the argument put forward by Durkheim, that suicide is an effect of individualization, a process of socio-economic ‘estrangement’ from agrarian communities experienced by rural producers in the context of rapid economic growth.     

Food security,food sovereignty,and local challenges for transnational agrarian movements: the Honduras case

This article examines the complicated histories of two competing development tropes in postwar Honduras: food security and food sovereignty. Food security emerged as a construct intertwined with land security and national food self-sufficiency soon after the militant, peasant-led movement for national agrarian reform in the 1970s. The transnational coalition, La Vía Campesina, launched their global food sovereignty campaign in the 1990s, in part to counter the global corporate industrial agro-food system. Cultural and political analysis reveals challenges for each trope. Food security resonates with deeply held peasant understandings of seguridad for their continued social reproduction in insecure social and natural conditions. In contrast, the word sovereignty, generally understood as powers of nation states, faces semantic confusion and distance from rural actors' lives. Moreover, Honduras's national peasant unions, weakened by funding cuts and neoliberal assaults on agrarian reform, diverted by their own efforts to help establish the transnational La Vía Campesina, have been unable and, in some cases, unwilling to campaign effectively for food sovereignty. In addition, a parallel network of NGO-supported sustainable agriculture centres has largely embraced the peasant understandings of food security, while remaining skeptical of ‘mismanaged, modernist’ agrarian reform and the food sovereignty campaign. Attention turns to structural analysis of the steady decline of agriculture, economy and social life in the Honduran countryside, while also identifying potentially hopeful local-national solidarities between peasant union and sustainable agriculture leaders within the popular resistance movement to the recent military coup. This article finds that transnational agrarian movements and food campaigns tend to ignore local peasant understandings, needs, and organisations at their own peril.