If consumers begin to be fearful and conserve the government takes action to overcome this mental condition. How? Expand credit. If consumers then become to euphoric and spend to much the government takes action to overcome this mental condition. How? Restrict credit. Consumers spend very little time in the middle. Mathematics should be left to… Read More »
About politicians and courage: Courage is always missing in politicians. It is like saying basketball players aren’t normally short. It isn’t a useful attribute. To be morally courageous is to say something different, which reduces your chances of winning an election. Courage is in a funny way more common in an old-fashioned sort of enlightened… Read More »
writes Gopnik in The Philosophical Baby, a tour through the recent findings of cognitive science about the minds of young children. For one thing, the prefrontal lobe, which has a major part in blocking out stimuli from other parts of the brain and fostering internally driven attention, is undeveloped in young children, and doesn’t fully… Read More »
If you count the book sales on Amazon and plot them according to frequency, the curve hugs the vertical and horizontal axes, indicating a few very large numbers (the blockbusters) and many small ones (the ‘long tail’ of books like yours and mine). This is a typical manifestation of something called a ‘power-law’ distribution. This… Read More »
COMMISION ON URBAN ANTHROPOLOGY, IUAES ANNUAL CONFERENCE Gioiosa Marea, Sicily, 7-9 May 2010 The Informal and the Formal: Contested Categories of Socio-Economic Life Convenor: Italo Pardo (University of Kent) OUTLINE This conference recognizes both the empirical difficulty in categorising human activities as belonging strictly to the formal sector or the informal sector of the economy and the blurred… Read More »
… is the title of a review of anthropologists Jean and Jean Comaroff’s book, Ethnicity, INC. An excerpt of the review: From the very beginning of their study, the authors ask us to take a step back and stop thinking about ethnicity only as a political tool. Rather, we should extend new attributes and opportunities… Read More »
The first in a series of posts on the financial crisis by economic anthrologist Keith Hart, at the ASA Globalog. The series will engage: long-run historical questions like what this crisis is, with the news as it unfolds in real time and with issues that matter practically to people who don’t have to be reminded… Read More »
Where next for Political Science in Africa? Debating Patrick Chabal’s ‘Africa: The Politics of Suffering and Smiling’ [link downloads a pdf file].
It is ‘the study of how to get rich without knowing how’. What must we do to end world poverty? At last, an answer: OK, that’s too good to be true. There has been a search for sixty years for the right answer. Now most economists confess ignorance how to raise the rate of economic growth… Read More »
From the website of the School for Advanced Research on the Human Experience: One six-month fellowship is available for a female social scientist from a developing nation, either pre- or post-doctoral, whose work addresses women’s economic and social empowerment in that nation. The goal of the program is twofold: to advance the scholarly careers of women… Read More »