Great Expectations

India's economy had virtually stagnated over a quarter-century until the early 1980s, with autarkic policies on trade and direct foreign investment. The expansion of the public sector had turned into an epidemic, trespassing into most areas of industrial activity, and not just utilities; and the licensing system had become a maze of irrational restrictions. With growth at 3.5% and population increasing at 2.2% annually, per capita income grew at a snail's pace (the infamous "Hindu rate of growth"). It therefore failed to pull the mass of people out of poverty and into gainful, sustained employment. We should then have expected a "revolution of falling expectations": The poor could have risen in revolt, bundling the ruling Congress Party out of power because there was no hope of improvement. One should note that the ratio of the poor to the overall population in India has declined dramatically over the period 1987-2000, in both rural and urban areas. If one goes by the official estimates, the decline has been to 26.8% from 39.4% in rural areas and to 24.1% from 39.1% in the cities. If we go by the alternative calculations done by Princeton economist Angus Deaton, the rural poverty ratio fell to 26.3% from 39.4% , and the urban to 12.0% from 22.5%. What these estimates show is that the standard explanation, so dear to the Indian novelists writing opeds on the subject -- that the rural areas have been neglected by India's economic reforms and the ensuing development -- is contrary to the facts. (But these writers do specialize in fiction.

Great Expectations

This stack follows a small proposal story gone wrong. The message is hopefully lighthearted, and the colorful, young-adult fiction titles stand in contrast to the chosen location. I thought the use of color would accentuate this sculpture stack. The story is an obviously purposeful collection surrounded by florescent lights and gray shelves

Great Expectations

Katherine Lara is an undergraduate student at Cal State LA majoring in English. In her narrative, “Great Expectations,” Katherine recounts the internal struggles she faced while trying to find her passion in life, all while dealing with the great expectations that come with being a first-generation student

Great Expectations

Great Expectations was the penultimate novel completed by the most popular novelist of Victorian England, Charles Dickens. Born in Kent, England, in 1812 to a family of modest means but great pretensions, Dickens’s early life was marked by both humiliation and ambition. Dickens never forgot the period of financial crisis during his childhood, when following his father’s bankruptcy, he was taken out of school and forced to work in a shoe-polish warehouse. While the episode was relatively brief, it marked Dickens’s later life in many ways: in the development of his own ambitions, in his sympathy for the poor and especially children, and in his outrage at social injustice and bureaucratic heartlessness. Great Expectations, written when Dickens was at the height of his popularity and success, demonstrates all these concerns. His thirteenth novel, it was not overtly autobiographical, as his earlier David Copperfield (1850) had been, but in writing it Dickens employed a first-person narrative that elicits mixed sympathy and judgment for the protagonist Pip, an orphan raised by an abusive elder sister and her saintly husband, a blacksmith. Pip’s story invokes an assortment of real-life issues of Victorian England, ranging from its relationship to its colonies, to its imperfect educational system, to its overarching concern with social mobility and status

Great expectations: The EU's social role as a great power manager

Through the case of EU foreign and security policy we reconsider the concept of great power. According to common wisdom, the EU cannot be a great power, whatever the pronouncements of its top officials may be. We argue that ‘great power’ has been miscast in IR theory as a status rather than as a social role, and, consequently, that the EU can indeed be viewed as playing the great power role. Such a conceptual shift moves analytical attention away from questions of what the EU is ‘big’, ‘small’, ‘great’, and so on to what it is expected to do in international politics. We focus on the expectation that great powers engage in the management of the international system, assessing the EU as a great power manager in two senses: First, in the classical sense of ‘great power management’ of Hedley Bull which centers on great powers’ creation of regional spheres of influence and the maintenance of the general balance of power and second, in light of recent corrections to Bull’s approach by Alexander Astrov and others, who suggest great power management has changed toward a logic of governmentality, i.e. ‘conducting the conduct’ of lesser states