Psy-expertise, therapeutic culture and the politics of the personal in development

Expertise stemming from the psy disciplines is increasingly and explicitly shaping international development policy and practice. Whilst some policy makers see the use of psy expertise as a new way to reduce poverty, increase economic efficiency, and promote wellbeing, others raise concerns that psychocentric development promotes individual over structural change, pathologises poverty, and depoliticises development. This paper specifically analyses four aspects of psy knowledge used in contemporary development policy: child development/developmental psychology, behavioural economics, positive psychology, and global mental health. This analysis illuminates the co-constitutive intellectual and colonial histories of development and psy-expertise: a connection that complicates claims that development has been psychologized; the uses and coloniality of both within a neoliberal project; and the potential for psychopolitics to inform development

Individual and regulatory ethics: an economic-ethical and theoretical-historical analysis of ordoliberalism

Based on Foucault’s analysis of German Neoliberalism and his thesis of ambiguity, the following paper draws a two-level distinction between individual and regulatory ethics. The individual ethics level – which has received surprisingly little attention – contains the Christian foundation of values and the liberal-Kantian heritage of so called Ordoliberalism – as one variety of neoliberalism. The regulatory or formal-institutional ethics level on the contrary refers to the ordoliberal framework of a socio-economic order. By differentiating these two levels of ethics incorporated in German Neoliberalism, it is feasible to distinguish dissimilar varieties of neoliberalism and to link Ordoliberalism to modern economic ethics. Furthermore, it allows a revision of the dominant reception of Ordoliberalism which focuses solely on the formal-institutional level while mainly neglecting the individual ethics level

Bartleby’s Consensual Dysphoria

The 2011 Occupy Wall Street protest movement adopted what on first blush appears to be a peculiar literary mascot: Bartleby the scrivener, one of the two protagonists of the Story of Wall Street penned by Herman Melville in the middle of the nineteenth-century. But this empathic identity of interests between twenty-first-century street protesters pushing back against the dominance of the .01% and a pathetic, melancholic, cadaverous, anorexic, apparently suicidal, and fictional mid-nineteenth-century legal scrivener is decidedly odd. In this paper, I ask and try to answer this question: what did the OWS protesters recognize in Bartleby that sparked their empathic identification? More broadly, what is it, in Bartleby and in his recalcitrance, that is recognizably and deeply human? Ultimately, I argue that Bartleby the man can be understood to suffer from an extreme case of what I call “consensual dysphoria,” a disorienting and disabling consciousness of a radical disjuncture between one’s felt subjective pleasures and pains, and the transactions and states of the world to which one gives one’s free or voluntary consent. Consensual dysphoria, as I will describe it, is an affliction felt by individuals, but it is not a psychological malady. It is, rather, a political malady felt by individuals in liberal states, and brought on by the powers of political rhetoric and influence. I claim that consensual dysphoria has been an acutely felt part of the consciousness of both the classical legal thought of the mid-nineteenth-century and the liberal legalist thought of our own time. Melville’s Bartleby had that condition in extremis, and the twenty-first-century protesters suffer from it as well. That commonality, I suggest, lays the groundwork for the otherwise inexplicable empathic bond between them. The first part of this paper discusses some of the scholarly literature on Bartleby, with an eye toward elucidating why it is that so few scholars have felt the need to understand Bartleby’s political malady – or more generally, to understand his humanity. The second part discusses the jurisprudential background and content of the story, expanding where need be on Brook Thomas’s similarly motivated account from the 1980s. The third and fourth parts introduce the idea of “consensual dysphoria” as an individualized, psychic manifestation of some of the discomforts attendant to liberal and neoliberal markets and state organization, and makes the case that this is the essence of Bartleby’s affliction. I conclude with some observations about the OWS movement informed by some aspects of this analysis

Can cash hold its own? International comparisons: Theory and evidence

A number of papers predict the imminent demise of currency use in transactions while some make a case for its continued use due to its distinctive feature of anonymity. Notwithstanding the latter, this paper shows on both theoretical and empirical grounds, that cash use is sustainable for the foreseeable future because of the cost competitiveness of ATM networked cash to the consumer relative to electronic POS card substitutes. Indeed, since the mid-1990s, Finland, Canada and France which are countries in the vanguard of EFTPOS development, have experienced a resurgence of ATM cash use as measured by its expenditure share.

Effect Of Import Tariff Implementation Policy On Refined Sugar Product Competitiveness In Indonesia

This research is intent to determining: (a) the effect of welfare distribution with applied import tariff of the government revenue, consumer expenditures, producer revenues, and efficiency losses (in production, in consumption and net effect), and (b) the level of competitiveness of cane sugar in Indonesia by calculating the Domestic Resource Cost (DRC). The research using libraries research method, that is collecting data from the related preceding researches and other references such as magazines, journals, bulletins and the like. The research result showed that : (a) the government revenue, change of consumer surplus, producer surplus, economic net loss in production and consumption and exchange gain economization, are influenced by the import tariff and elasticity price toward supply and demand, so that the welfare distribution value will be bigger; (b) sugar product competitiveness in Indonesia by knowing cane field calculation in East Java both wet and dry field is higher than the same product from other countries as it is shown by the value of DRC<1.Sugar, Welfare Distribution, Domestic Resource Cost (DRC), and Import tariff, Agribusiness,

Gravitational Wave Chirp Search: Economization of PN Matched Filter Bank via Cardinal Interpolation

The final inspiral phase in the evolution of a compact binary consisting of black holes and/or neutron stars is among the most probable events that a network of ground-based interferometric gravitational wave detectors is likely to observe. Gravitational radiation emitted during this phase will have to be dug out of noise by matched-filtering (correlating) the detector output with a bank of several $10^5$ templates, making the computational resources required quite demanding, though not formidable. We propose an interpolation method for evaluating the correlation between template waveforms and the detector output and show that the method is effective in substantially reducing the number of templates required. Indeed, the number of templates needed could be a factor $\sim 4$ smaller than required by the usual approach, when the minimal overlap between the template bank and an arbitrary signal (the so-called {\it minimal match}) is 0.97. The method is amenable to easy implementation, and the various detector projects might benefit by adopting it to reduce the computational costs of inspiraling neutron star and black hole binary search.Comment: scheduled for publicatin on Phys. Rev. D 6