101,439 research outputs found
Poor Relief, Informal Assistance, and Short Time During the Lancashire Cotton Famine
[Excerpt] This paper presents new evidence concerning the importance of poor relief as a source of income assistance for unemployed operatives during the Lancashire cotton famine. My comparison of weekly data on the number of relief recipients in 23 distressed poor law unions with estimates of weekly cotton consumption for the period November 1861 to December 1862 suggests that the average length of time between becoming unemployed and receiving poor relief was less than 2 months. This result is shown to be consistent with available evidence on working class saving. Given the meager amount of informal assistance available to them, most operatives were forced to turn to the poor law for income assistance within 4 to 8 weeks of becoming unemployed
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Number of Pages: 2Integrative BiologyGeological Science
Malthus Was Right After All: Poor Relief and Birth Rates in Southeastern England
The payment of child allowances to laborers with large families was widespread in early nineteenth-century England. This paper tests Thomas Malthus\u27s hypothesis that child allowances caused the birth rate to increase. A cross-sectional regression model is estimated to explain variations in birth rates across parishes in 1826-30. Birth rates are found to be related to child allowances, income, and the availability of housing, as Malthus contended. The paper concludes by examining the role played by the adoption of child allowances after 1795 in the fertility increase of the early nineteenth century
The Historical Background of the Communist Manifesto
[Excerpt] The Manifesto of the Communist Party, published 150 years ago in London in February 1848, is one of the most influential and widely-read documents of the past two centuries. The historian A. J. P. Taylor (1967, p. 7) has called it a holy book, and contends that because of it, everyone thinks differently about politics and society. And yet, despite its enormous influence in the 20th century, the Manifesto is very much a period piece, a document of what was called the hungry 1840s. It is hard to imagine it being written in any other decade of the 19th century. The critique of capitalism offered by Marx and Engels in the Manifesto is understandable in the context of economic conditions in Britain from 1837 to 1848, and it is not that different, in places, from the conclusions reached by other social critics during the 1840s.
This paper attempts to place the Manifestos analysis of capitalist economic development in historical perspective. I begin by summarizing the economic arguments of Marx and Engels. While the Manifesto-was written by Marx, its economic analysis was strongly influenced by Engels\u27s practical experience of capitalism in his family\u27s cotton firm in Manchester, England, in 1842-44. Upon his return to Germany, Engels published in 1845 a scathing indictment of early industrial capitalism, The Condition of the Working Class in England. Much of Engels\u27s critique of British capitalism reappears in greatly condensed form in Section I of the Manifesto. The second part of the paper examines the economic, social, and political conditions in Manchester and the surrounding south Lancashire cotton towns in the 1830s and 1840s, drawing largely on the views of contemporary observers. I then look at recent research on the standard of living of the working class from 1820 to 1851, focusing on conditions in the Lancashire cotton industry during the hungry \u2740s. Finally, I examine economic conditions in England in the two or three decades after the Manifesto was published, and briefly discuss why Marx and Engels\u27s predictions for the imminent collapse of capitalism were so wide of the mark
[Review of the book \u3ci\u3eThe Scottish Poor Law, 1745-1845\u3c/i\u3e]
[Excerpt] While much has been written in the past 20 years concerning the Old Poor Law in England, very little attention has been given to the development of the Scottish Poor Law. This is surprising, given that the Scottish Poor Law differed radically from its English counterpart in its response to the increasing poverty of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. R. A. Cage\u27s descriptive account of the administration of the Poor Law in Scotland from 1745 to 1845 is therefore a welcome addition to the existing literature on the early development of the British social welfare system
Learning Group Formation Factors in a Career and Technical Education Networking Program
Team based learning based on the transformation of permanent student groups into powerful learning teams is widely and successfully used as an instructional strategy in postsecondary career and technical education. Failure of groups to reach the learning team status is a major learning drawback of this approach. Factors affecting the transformation of groups to teams are applied consistently to the whole class, with the exception of group formation and membership. Career and technical education populations differ from other postsecondary populations and examination of group formation factors may result in improvement of student results.Abstract / Introduction / Problem Statement / Purpose of Study / Literature Review / Method / Results / Conclusion / References / Appendix 1 - Consent Form / Appendix 2 Student Questionnaire - Group Selection / Appendix 3 Student Response Dat
[Review of the book \u3ci\u3eInterwar Unemployment in International Perspective\u3c/i\u3e]
[Excerpt] The book redresses two imbalances in the recent literature on interwar unemployment: its almost exclusive focus on the United States and Britain, and its predominantly macroeconomic nature. To achieve these goals, the editors encouraged the authors of the country studies to address a set of microeconomic issues, including the extent to which the incidence and duration of unemployment varied across economic and demographic groups, and the effect of unemployment on labor force participation and poverty. Two macroeconomic issues also are addressed in several of the papers: the effects of real wages and of unemployment insurance on unemployment. These two issues have been hotly debated in the recent literature on interwar unemployment in the United States and Britain, and their discussion here for other industrialized countries represents a significant addition to the current debate
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