Beyond Katrina: Improving Disaster Response Capabilities

As Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma successively lashed the Gulf Coast starting in late August 2005, nature’s fury exposed serious weaknesses in the United States’s emergency response capabilities. These problems were not simply the failure of particular places or leaders to be ready for disaster but rather an indication of more fundamental issues. These must be addressed if the country is to be ready for serious challenges that may lay ahead, whether severe natural disasters, outbreaks of emergent infectious disease, or renewed terrorist attacks

Microfoundations

The paper argues that the microfoundations programme can be understood as an implementation of an underlying methodological principle, methodological individualism, and that it therefore shares a fundamental ambiguity with that principle, viz, whether the macro must be derived from and therefore reducible to, or rather consistent with micro-level behaviours. The pluralist conclusion of the paper is not that research guided by the principle of microfoundations is necessarily wrong, but that the exclusion of approaches not guided by that principle is indeed necessarily wrong. The argument is made via an examination of the advantages claimed for dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models, the relationship between parts and wholes in social science, and the concepts of reduction, substrate neutrality, the intentional stance, and hypostatisation

Microfoundations

This paper argues that the microfoundations programme can be understood as an implementation of an underlying methodological principle—methodological individualism—and that it therefore shares a fundamental ambiguity with that principle, viz, whether the macro must be derived from and therefore reducible to, or rather consistent with, micro-level behaviours. The pluralist conclusion of the paper is not that research guided by the principle of microfoundations is necessarily wrong, but that the exclusion of approaches not guided by that principle is indeed necessarily wrong. The argument is made via an examination of the advantages claimed for dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models, the relationship between parts and wholes in social science, and the concepts of reduction, substrate neutrality, the intentional stance, and hypostatisation

On the growth and welfare effects of monopolistic distortions

Endogenous growth, Competition, Deregulation, Poverty trap, Trade liberalization, F15, F43, O31, O34, O41,