Atlantic Exchange: Case Studies of Housing and Community Redevelopment in the United States and the United Kingdom

Examines lessons learned from community redevelopment initiatives in Birmingham, England, and Chicago. Explores physical, managerial, and demographic changes and issues of place identity, community cohesion, and the communities' place in city initiatives

Upstairs downstairs: how introducing computer technology changed skills and pay on two floors of Cabot Bank

Assessing the differing impacts of a new computer technology on skills and pay in two departments of a large bank.Checks ; Check collection systems ; Check float ; Job security ; Employees, Training of

The CHA's Plan for Transformation: How Have Residents Fared?

Summarizes findings from studies on how relocation from distressed public housing changed former residents' quality of life, including living conditions, safety, poverty, employment, health, well-being of children, and satisfaction. Outlines implications

Protein Structure Prediction Using Basin-Hopping

Associative memory Hamiltonian structure prediction potentials are not overly rugged, thereby suggesting their landscapes are like those of actual proteins. In the present contribution we show how basin-hopping global optimization can identify low-lying minima for the corresponding mildly frustrated energy landscapes. For small systems the basin-hopping algorithm succeeds in locating both lower minima and conformations closer to the experimental structure than does molecular dynamics with simulated annealing. For large systems the efficiency of basin-hopping decreases for our initial implementation, where the steps consist of random perturbations to the Cartesian coordinates. We implemented umbrella sampling using basin-hopping to further confirm when the global minima are reached. We have also improved the energy surface by employing bioinformatic techniques for reducing the roughness or variance of the energy surface. Finally, the basin-hopping calculations have guided improvements in the excluded volume of the Hamiltonian, producing better structures. These results suggest a novel and transferable optimization scheme for future energy function development

On strongly fortified minds : Self-restraint and cooperation in the discussion tradition

Accordingly, this essay explores some unappreciated benefits of discussion.2 While educators frequently favor discussion as a means to encouraging engaged learning, they nonetheless rarely attempt to explain how or why these benefits arise. More than this, the role of economists from Adam Smith through Frank Knight and his student, James Buchanan, in explaining the benefits associated with discussion has been neglected both within economics and throughout the academy. In this tradition one accepts the inevitability of an individual point of view and the good society is one that can govern itself by means of an emergent consensus among points of view. In this chapter we demonstrate that beginning with Smith and continuing through the experimental economists and Amartya Sen, economists have expounded upon the rich moral and material benefits associated with discussion - benefits that contribute to a well-governed social order.3 To emphasize the common themes in this neglected tradition, we shall refer to it as the discussion tradition

Adam Smith and the Place of Faction

Our approach to faction focuses on Smith’s account of the interrelation between social distance and small group cohesion. We make the case that social distance is not necessarily constant in Smith’s system. As social distance shrinks, sympathy becomes more habitual and the affection we have for others increases (Peart and Levy, 2005b). Factions reduce social distance, and this gives them power and makes them dangerous. By modifying social distance, they created a disconnect between behavior of which we approve (cooperation) and consequences of which we disapprove. It is in this context that we find virtuous behavior with deleterious consequences. The identification of ‘corruption’ with faction is emphasized in Young (1997, pp.157-158). We take the additional step of connecting the identification to the conclusion that the institution that allows corrupt actions to flourish is in need of reform

Learning from Failure: A Review of Peter Schuck’s Why Government Fails So Often: And How It Can Do Better (Book Review)

Peter Schuck catalogs an overwhelming list of US government failures. He points to both structural problems (culture and institutions) and incentives. Despairing of cultural change, Schuck focuses on incentives. He relies on Charles Wolf ’s theory of nonmarket failures in which “internalities” replace the heavily-studied market failure from externalities (Wolf 1979). Internalities are evidence of a discord between the public goals by which a program is defended and the private goals of its administrators. What might economists contribute? We suggest that economists have neglected internalities because they take group goals as exogenously determined and we defend an alternative tradition in which group goals are endogenously determined. ( JEL A11, D72, D82

The Ethics Problem: Toward a Second-Best Solution to the Problem of Economic Expertise

The collective action problem of economic experts was diagnosed acutely by Knight and Pigou in the 1930s. The interest of economists as a group is in pursuing the public good of truth; the interest of an individual economist is in pursuing the private good of happiness. Pigou’s example is the pursuit of political influence. Deviation from truth-seeking devastates the theory of governance as objective inquiry laid out by Knight and John Rawls, as we saw in the eugenic era. We reformulate the Knight–Rawls position as truth-seeking contingent on a presupposed system. The best case for the Knight–Rawls position is transparency, where presuppositions are common knowledge. If transparency is infeasible making the nontransparency of inquiry itself transparent will serve as a second-best solution to warn third parties to make adjustments. A code of ethics can itself serve as a warning about the temptation. Pigou’s concern about nonpecuniary temptation should be added to the American Economic Association code of ethics

Denying Human Homogeneity: Eugenics & Making of Post-Classical Economics

The question we propose to address is how did economics move from the classical period characterized by the hardest possible doctrine of initial human homogeneity—all the observed differences among people arise from incentives, luck, and history1—to become comfortable with accounts of human behavior which alleged foundational differences among and within races of people? (Darity 1995) In this paper, we shall argue that early British eugenics thinkers racialized economics in the post-classical period.