[Review of] Gina Marchetti. Romance mId the Yellow Peril: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction

Marchetti poignantly mirrors Orientalism as conceived in the eyes of typical Hollywood filmmakers of their Eurocentric discourse, flavored with their own notions of romance, race and sexuality, and the Yellow Peril, the way they want to entertain the American viewers. The book introduces fifteen major classical films which span over a seventy-year period (1915-1985) with sharp literary as well as cinematographic criticism on Protestant ethics, gender supremacy, and conjugal family structure

The fiscal impact of population change: discussion

It is now well established that world-wide demographic shifts are going to affect both the U. S. and world economies in ways that are not entirely predictable. What we can do--and what Ronald Lee and Ryan Edwards do so well--is to plot out for the future some of the fiscal implications under reasonable guesses about demographic, economic, and legal factors. These factors include what we know already from the past, such as the maximum number of people in the world of any age over 0 next year and over 10 in another ten years. A typical next step is to posit what in estimating circles is known as "current law" (defined partly by convention, not just law). Even if that law cannot possibly be maintained, some of its implications can be understood. Finally, one assumes some reasonable parameters, such as future fertility, mortality, and labor force participation, largely based on historical trends.Demography ; Economic conditions

Formation of fiscal policy: the experience of the past twenty-five years - commentary

Fiscal policy ; Budget

The seven deadly sins in aging policy and research: a cautionary list for policy makers and prognosticators

Pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed, and sloth—theologians tell us that we become better people by examining these sources of failure. But my concern here is not with the classic seven deadly sins, but what I feel are the contemporary seven deadly sins being committed in current policy and research on aging. Reflecting on them likewise provides some warning signs for us acting as policymakers, researchers, or prognosticators.Labor supply ; Older people

Metastability and rapid convergence to quasi-stationary bar states for the 2D Navier-Stokes Equations

Quasi-stationary, or metastable, states play an important role in two-dimensional turbulent fluid flows where they often emerge on time-scales much shorter than the viscous time scale, and then dominate the dynamics for very long time intervals. In this paper we propose a dynamical systems explanation of the metastability of an explicit family of solutions, referred to as bar states, of the two-dimensional incompressible Navier-Stokes equation on the torus. These states are physically relevant because they are associated with certain maximum entropy solutions of the Euler equations, and they have been observed as one type of metastable state in numerical studies of two-dimensional turbulence. For small viscosity (high Reynolds number), these states are quasi-stationary in the sense that they decay on the slow, viscous timescale. Linearization about these states leads to a time-dependent operator. We show that if we approximate this operator by dropping a higher-order, non-local term, it produces a decay rate much faster than the viscous decay rate. We also provide numerical evidence that the same result holds for the full linear operator, and that our theoretical results give the optimal decay rate in this setting.Comment: 21 pages, 2 figures. Version 3: minor error from version 2 correcte

Why Not a "Super Simple" Saving Plan for the United States?

Describes a basic, low-cost plan to help workers build savings, with minimum employer contributions for low- and moderate-income employees, automatic employee contributions, a significant government match, streamlined retirement plans, and fairer rules