Fiscal Policy Preferences, Trade-Offs, and Support for Social Investment

A common finding in the literature is that social investment policies are broadly popularamong citizens but still politically difficult to implement. This article provides a partialanswer to this puzzle by exploring the fiscal trade-offs associated with such a recalibration.Based on survey data from eight Western European countries, it first explores citizens’fiscal policy preferences with regard to the preferred size of the public sector and the distributionof spending across different subsectors. These preferences are then shown to besignificantly associated with attitudes towards fiscal trade-offs regarding the expansion ofsocial investment policies. The results reveal a political dilemma for policy-makers keen onexpanding social investment: People who traditionally support a large public sector andmore welfare state spending tend to oppose redistributing spending towards social investment,whereas support for such a recalibration is higher among those who have a scepticalview on public spending.Introduction Theoretical framework Empirical analysis Conclusion Supplementary material Data Availability Statement Footnotes Reference

Orchestrators of coordination:Towards a new role of the state in coordinated capitalism?

Liberalization poses significant challenges for the continued provision of collective goods within coordinated market economies (CME). Extant scholarship suggests two dominant sets of responses. Either CMEs continue to rely on employer coordination, but only for a privileged core, leading to dualization. Or, in cases where the state enjoys high capacity, the state instead compensates for liberalization but ends up crowding out employer coordination. In both cases, the result is decreasing employer coordination. We argue that in CMEs, the state may also play the role of “orchestrator” by supporting the revitalization of employer coordination. It does so through the deployment of ideational and institutional resources that mobilize employers’ associations on a voluntary basis. Applying our framework to a core area of coordinated capitalism, vocational education and training, we show that in both Germany and Switzerland, this indirect and soft form of state intervention was instrumental for turning around their crisis-stricken vocational training systems.publishe

Acer negundo L.

https://thekeep.eiu.edu/herbarium_specimens_byname/21575/thumbnail.jp

Acer negundo L.

https://thekeep.eiu.edu/herbarium_specimens_byname/21575/thumbnail.jp

Viola rafinesquii Greene

https://thekeep.eiu.edu/herbarium_specimens_byname/20697/thumbnail.jp

Vascular Flora of Hooper Branch Savanna Nature Preserve, Iroquois County, Illinois

INHS Technical Report prepared for Illinois Department of Natural Resources, Division of Natural Heritag

Quantum phenomenology of conjunction fallacy

A quantum-like description of human decision process is developed, and a heuristic argument supporting the theory as sound phenomenology is given. It is shown to be capable of quantitatively explaining the conjunction fallacy in the same footing as the violation of sure-thing principle.Comment: LaTeX 8 pages, 2 figure

Quantum effects in linguistic endeavors

Classifying the information content of neural spike trains in a linguistic endeavor, an uncertainty relation emerges between the bit size of a word and its duration. This uncertainty is associated with the task of synchronizing the spike trains of different duration representing different words. The uncertainty involves peculiar quantum features, so that word comparison amounts to measurement-based-quantum computation. Such a quantum behavior explains the onset and decay of the memory window connecting successive pieces of a linguistic text. The behavior here discussed is applicable to other reported evidences of quantum effects in human linguistic processes, so far lacking a plausible framework, since either no efforts to assign an appropriate quantum constant had been associated or speculating on microscopic processes dependent on Planck's constant resulted in unrealistic decoherence times