A New Birth of Freedom

The president of the United States had been more than usually agitated ever since the news of a major collision of the Union and Confederate armies around Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, first flew along the telegraph wires to the War Department on July 1, 1863. For days, he was clouded with “sadness and despondency” until the message arrived, announcing a great victory for the Union. That was followed almost at once by news from Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles: another dispatch had come in, “communicating the fall of Vicksburg [Mississippi] on the fourth of July.” At once, Abraham Lincoln’s mood changed, and he was “beaming with joy.” That night, the war-swollen population of Washington City joined in reveling over the twin victories. “The news immediately spread throughout the city, creating intense and joyous excitement,” and “[f]lags were displayed from all the Departments, and crowds assembled with cheers.” A large throng marched up Pennsylvania Avenue with the U.S. Marine Band at their head, milling in front of the White House and calling on the president for a speech. [excerpt

Stepping Beyond the Smith Plaintiffs‘ Reliance on Corso: An Alternative Approach to Recovering Emotional-Distress Damages in Wrongful-Birth Cases in New Hampshire

[Excerpt] “More than twenty years ago, in Smith v. Cote, the New Hampshire Supreme Court held “that New Hampshire recognizes a cause of action for wrongful birth.” After so holding, the court then discussed the damages available to a prevailing wrongful-birth plaintiff. Among other things, the court held that when parental emotional distress associated with raising a disabled child, born after the mother had received negligent pre-natal assurance of the baby‘s normal health, “results in tangible pecuniary losses, such as medical expenses or counseling fees, such losses are recoverable.” The court further held that a wrongful-birth plaintiff may not recover intangible damages for the ongoing emotional distress associated with raising a disabled child who was carried to term as a result of negligent prenatal care. However, because it was not raised on appeal, the Smith opinion did not address an alternative basis for recovering emotional-distress damages—Linda Smith‘s claim under Corso v. Merrill for the emotional distress associated with witnessing the birth of her disabled daughter after she had been assured that her daughter would be born healthy. I argue that while it seems unlikely that the New Hampshire Supreme Court would give wrongful-birth plaintiffs a Corso claim, the court, if presented with the correct legal question, could well rule that wrongful-birth plaintiffs may recover for the emotional distress they suffer as a result of witnessing the birth of an unexpectedly disabled child. I begin with a brief discussion of the facts of Smith and the nature of a cause of action for wrongful birth. Next I examine the salient points of Corso and describe the parental-bystander doctrine the New Hampshire Supreme Court adopted in that case. In the following section, I assay the application of Corso to Smith, both as a logical matter and in terms of case law from other jurisdictions. Finally, I reframe the question from the one posed by the pleadings in Smith, i.e., whether a wrongful-birth plaintiff also has a Corso claim, and address the question that really matters: whether a wrongful-birth plaintiff in New Hampshire can recover for the emotional distress associated with witnessing the birth of an unexpectedly disabled child. Based upon both out-of-state authority and New Hampshire precedent, I conclude that a wrongful-birth plaintiff in New Hampshire should be able recover such damages even without a Corso claim.

Minimal quasi-stationary distribution approximation for a birth and death process

In a first part, we prove a Lyapunov-type criterion for the $\xi\_1$-positive recurrence of absorbed birth and death processes and provide new results on the domain of attraction of the minimal quasi-stationary distribution. In a second part, we study the ergodicity and the convergence of a Fleming-Viot type particle system whose particles evolve independently as a birth and death process and jump on each others when they hit $0$. Our main result is that the sequence of empirical stationary distributions of the particle system converges to the minimal quasi-stationary distribution of the birth and death process.Comment: The new version provides an original Lyapunov-type criterion for the $\xi\_1$-positive recurrence of a birth and death process. An original result on the domain of attraction of the minimal quasi-stationary distribution of a birth and death processes is also included. (26 pages

Impact of Augmented Prenatal Care on Birth Outcomes of Medicaid Recipients in New York City

I examine whether New York State's Prenatal Care Assistance Program (PCAP) is associated with greater use of prenatal services and improved birth outcomes. PCAP is New York State's augmented prenatal care initiative that became a part of the Medicaid program after expansion in income eligibility thresholds in January, 1990. Data are from the linkage of Medicaid administrative files with New York City birth certificates (N=23,243). For women on cash assistance, I find PCAP is associated with a 20 percent increase in the likelihood of enrollment in WIC, an increase in mean birth weight of 35 grams and a 1.3 percentage point drop in the rate of low birth weight. Associations between PCAP and improved birth outcomes for women on medical assistance are similar, but appear contaminated by selection bias. Reductions in newborn costs associated with PCAP participation are modest, between $100-$300 dollars per recipient, and are insufficient to offset program expenditures.

The Birth-Death-Mutation process: a new paradigm for fat tailed distributions

Fat tailed statistics and power-laws are ubiquitous in many complex systems. Usually the appearance of of a few anomalously successful individuals (bio-species, investors, websites) is interpreted as reflecting some inherent "quality" (fitness, talent, giftedness) as in Darwin's theory of natural selection. Here we adopt the opposite, "neutral", outlook, suggesting that the main factor explaining success is merely luck. The statistics emerging from the neutral birth-death-mutation (BDM) process is shown to fit marvelously many empirical distributions. While previous neutral theories have focused on the power-law tail, our theory economically and accurately explains the entire distribution. We thus suggest the BDM distribution as a standard neutral model: effects of fitness and selection are to be identified by substantial deviations from it

Estimated Percentage of Females Who Will Become Teen Mothers: Differences Across States

An estimated 18 percent of females nationwide will become teen mothers, according to this Child Trends research brief. The brief also finds that states vary widely in the estimated percentage of females who will have a baby before the age of 20, ranging from 8% in New Hampshire to 30% in Mississippi. Additional findings: --The 2006 estimated percentage of females who will have a teen birth is slightly higher than the 2005 estimate of 17 percent, which reflects a recent increase in the teen birth rate between 2005 and 2006. --For the nation, the estimated percentage of females becoming teen mothers declined from 25 percent in 1991 to 17 percent in 2005, reflecting a drop in teen birth rates during this period. --25 percent or more of females were estimated to become teen mothers in 9 states, concentrated primarily in the South and Southwest. In contrast, in only three states - New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts - were less than 10 percent of females estimated to become teen mothers. --State-level rankings on the likelihood of becoming a teen mother mirror traditional state rankings based on teen birth rates, but are not identical due to differences in the age-specific birth rates and the population distribution within each state

The New Value debate and the birth of a paradigm

This article updates the paper ‘Mr Marx and the Neoclassics’ presented at the July 1996 conference of the History of Economics Society in Vancouver. It assesses the challenge presented by temporal analysis to both neoclassical orthodoxy and orthodox interpretations of Marx’s thought. It provides a rigorous value-theoretic account of the falling profit rate, of crisis, and of unequal world development rooted in an account of the value-price relation that conforms to Marx’s disputed expectations. This challenge represents a convergence of a number of different strains of thought. It involves a systematic reconsideration of the role of money and its relation to value. And it explores an alternative to the persistent dogma that economic movement may be captured by the mutations of a static or simultaneous equation system in which the only dynamic effects are the temporal evolution of its parameters. This alternative view reinstates the notion which Marshall and Walras sought to extirpate, of successive or temporal causation. The combination of these two insights has been variously termed the sequential nondualist or temporal approach (a term due to Gil Skillman). This revolution in thought, it is argued, goes beyond Marxist economics and offers a rigorous foundation for political economy as a whole. It has met powerful resistance. The conclusion drawn is that two exercises are needed: To enquire into the reasons this resistance, and to situate the ‘new’ theory – in actuality a reassertion of classical orthodoxy – in the general framework of the history of political economy.TSSI; Temporalism; Marx; Value; Marshall; Walras; non-equilibrium; history of thought; Keynes; Austrian Economics; Post-Keynesian economics