What gets media attention and how media attention evolves over time: Large-scale empirical evidence from 196 countries

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Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid, and Reform

In the mid-1990s, as many as one million North Koreans died in one of the worst famines of the twentieth century. The socialist food distribution system collapsed primarily because of a misguided push for self-reliance, but was compounded by the regime's failure to formulate a quick response-including the blocking of desperately needed humanitarian relief. * As households, enterprises, local party organs, and military units tried to cope with the economic collapse, a grassroots process of marketization took root. However, rather than embracing these changes, the North Korean regime opted for tentative economic reforms with ambiguous benefits and a self-destructive foreign policy. As a result, a chronic food shortage continues to plague North Korea today. * In their carefully researched book, Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland present the most comprehensive and penetrating account of the famine to date, examining not only the origins and aftermath of the crisis but also the regime's response to outside aid and the effect of its current policies on the country's economic future. Their study begins by considering the root causes of the famine, weighing the effects of the decline in the availability of food against its poor distribution. Then it takes a close look at the aid effort, addressing the difficulty of monitoring assistance within the country, and concludes with an analysis of current economic reforms and strategies of engagement. * North Korea's famine exemplified the depredations that can arise from tyrannical rule and the dilemmas such regimes pose for the humanitarian community, as well as the obstacles inherent in achieving economic and political reform. To reveal the state's culpability in this tragic event is a vital project of historical recovery, one that is especially critical in light of our current engagement with the "North Korean question."

A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges, and New Opportunities

Examines the state of the foundation's efforts to improve educational opportunities worldwide through universal access to and use of high-quality academic content

Metabolizing Capital: Writing, Information, and the Biophysical World

While the discipline of rhetoric and composition has looked at a variety of topics related to the materiality of writing, the majority of materialist approaches limit their scope to local, situated writing practices. However, with the spread of digital media and the establishment of a global, networked infrastructure for communication and inscription, the abundant textuality that has emerged in the early 21st century demands that we develop more rigorous materialist approaches to the study and teaching of writing. This growing textual environment has been called, in popular and academic discourse, Web 2.0—a more “social Web” than its early form in the late 1990s, one that encourages more interaction and collaboration between users. The ethos of sharing that defines Web 2.0 has been celebrated by writing scholars as a qualitatively new public sphere where we are writing and participating more than ever. Yet, underlying our exuberance of Web 2.0 is the problematic assumption that more writing is an intrinsic good. As more writing is produced, the logic goes, the richer the opportunities for human agency. In a world of infinite resources, such a productivist ethos makes sense; but in a world of finite resources, one whose health is intertwined with our global network of writing technologies, unrestrained textual production has become a threat to other human and nonhuman systems. In this dissertation, I analyze current materialist approaches to writing to theorize how the usefulness of Web 2.0 technologies--and the writing labor they harness—have become necessary agents in the production of capitalist, consumer culture. Drawing on ecological models of writing and supplementing them with Marxian concepts of value, metabolism, and capital circulation, I explore the historical and dialectical relations that have given rise to a new phase of digital culture, one called Web 3.0, where the celebrated use value of Web 2.0 writing is eclipsed by the ascendant exchange value of Big Data--the massive substratum of consumer data that is produced as a by-product of our writing. Because the economic value of user data depends on two critical resources--the labor of our writing and the finite natural resources of the planet—our celebration of the productivity of Web 2.0 is in direct antagonism with other natural systems, including the organic system of the writing body. I conclude with a sequence of writing activities designed to help students foster critical, ecological literacies that will prepare them to grapple with the social and ecological problems emerging in Web 3.

For the Greater Good? The Devastating Ripple Effects of the Lockdown Measures

As the crisis around Covid-19 evolves, it becomes clear that there are numerous negative side- effects of the lockdown strategies implemented by many countries. Currently, more evidence becomes available that the lockdowns may have more negative effects than positive effects. For instance, many measures taken in a lockdown aimed at protecting human life may compromise the immune system, and purpose in life, especially of vulnerable groups. This leads to the paradoxical situation of compromising the immune system and physical and mental health of many people, including the ones we aim to protect. Also, it is expected that hundreds of millions of people will die from hunger and postponed medical treatments. Other side effects include financial insecurity of billions of people, physical and mental health problems, and increased inequalities. The economic and health repercussions of the crisis will be falling disproportionately on young workers, low-income families and women, and thus exacerbate ex

US-Europe Differences in Technology-Driven Growth: Quantifying the Role of Education

European economic growth has been weak, compared to the US, since the 80s. In previous work (Krueger and Kumar, 2003), we argued that the European focus on specialized, vocational education might have been effective during the 60s and 70s, but resulted in a growth gap relative to the US during the subsequent information age, when new technologies emerged more rapidly. In this paper, we extend our framework to assess the quantitative importance of education policy, when compared to labor market rigidity and product market regulation, other policy differences more commonly suggested to be responsible for US-Europe differences. A assigns a major role to education policy in explaining US-Europe growth differences.