Local Food Policy & Consumer Food Cooperatives: Evolutionary Case Studies

Darwin’s theory of natural selection has played a central role in the development of the biological sciences, but evolution can also explain change in human culture. Institutions, mechanisms that govern behavior and social order, are important subjects of cultural evolution. Institutions can help stabilize cooperation, defined as behavior that benefits others, often at a personal cost. Cooperation is important for solving social dilemmas, scenarios in which the interests of the individual conflict with those of the group. A number of mechanisms by which institutions evolve to support cooperation have been identified, yet theoretical models of institutional change have rarely been applied to local food institutions, which may be sustained by cooperation. This thesis poses the general question, how do local food institutions and organizations evolve? Chapter one uses a macro-evolutionary framework to explore the emergence and spread of two local food policies over time and space. First, I demonstrate how the rapid proliferation of cottage food laws in the U.S. is consistent with positive selection pressure at the individual, group, and state levels. Second, I illustrate how social learning and group transmission played a key role in the spread and diffusion of a municipal food sovereignty ordinance in Maine, ultimately changing selection pressure at the state level and amplifying town-level adoption. Finally, I offer concluding thoughts about the application of this framework to similar cases, including the propagation of single-use plastic bag bans. Chapter two serves as a micro-evolutionary analysis of organizational change in food buying clubs, small organizations which use collective purchasing power to obtain bulk quantities of organic, local, and specialty foods. Since these groups require cooperation from members through order-sharing and shared work tasks, I hypothesize that successful clubs possess traits which allow them to sustain cooperation and overcome social dilemmas. I predict that club members will be cooperative toward their groups, and that successful clubs will exercise generalized reciprocity and adopt rules to stabilize cooperation. Data from online surveys, experimental economic games, and phone interviews were analyzed using mixed methods to identify patterns of cooperation in groups. My results provide general support for my hypothesis that successful clubs have adaptations suited to overcome challenges. Specifically, I find that 1) buying club members are especially cooperative toward their groups when compared to other populations, 2) clubs exercise reciprocity in order-sharing, 3) reciprocity itself may not be a group adaptation, but group size is sufficient to support reciprocity in clubs, and 4) the adoption of rules is likely a key factor in club success and longevity. Finally, I offer practical advice for buying club management and operation

Contributions to modeling and computer efficient estimation for Gaussian space -time processes

This thesis research provides several contributions to computer efficient methodology for estimation with space-time data. First we propose a parsimonious class of computer-efficient Gaussian spatial interaction models that includes as special cases CAR and SAR-like models. This extended class is capable of modeling smooth spatial random fields. We show that, for rectangular lattices, this class is equivalent to higher-order Markov random fields. Thus we capture the computational advantage of iterative updating of Markov random fields, while at the same time provide the possibility of simple interpretation of smooth spatial structure. This class of spatial models is defined via a spatial structure removing orthogonal transformation, which we propose for any spatial interaction model as a means to improve computation time. Such a transformation is a one-time preprocessing step in iterative estimation, such as in MCMC. For very large data on a rectangular lattice we can achieve further computational savings by circulant embedding which enables use of FFT for calculations. We examine how the model as well as the embedding can be incorporated in hierarchical models for space time data with spatially varying temporal trend components. We describe an application in arctic hydrology where gridded runoff fields are investigated for local trends

The Role of Cooperation and Prosocial Behavior in Food Buying Clubs: An Exploratory Study

Buying clubs arise when a group of individuals convenes to use their collective purchasing power to obtain bulk quantities of items, in this case food, at per-unit prices lower than offered by traditional grocers, or specialty items that are difficult to find. As cooperatively-structured groups, it is hypothesized that they function on the core principles of cooperation, reciprocity and other prosocial behaviors which support the benefit of the group rather than individual benefit. This research aims to test this by observing, identifying and analyzing behaviors which are instrumental in the success or failure of buying clubs, and by measuring cooperation empirically with two experimental economic games. I am interested in the relationship between institutions and cooperation, and one way to examine this is through the work of Elinor Ostrom. We examined the influence of institutional factors including cooperation, measures of participation, and successful collective action to see if they were greater among members of buying clubs with more rules corresponding to Elinor Ostrom’s institutional design principles. While no strong association between the design principles and buying club cooperation was found, participants in this survey donated nearly twice the expected percent of their endowment in each experimental game, suggesting that the buying club members in this study are more cooperative on average than members of the general public

The Academic Doctorate in Law: A Vehicle for Legal Transplants?

In our current era of globalization, there has been considerable writing about the ways in which U.S. ideas about law are diffused to other countries. While some of this literature refers to graduate degrees for foreign lawyers, most authors ignore the nature of the degree itself and the complexity of the U.S. legal educational environment in which the degree is pursued. This article argues that the academization and internationalization of U.S. legal education, combined with the growing dominance of U.S. legal models worldwide, has produced an unprecedented level of interest in U.S. S.J.D. and J.S.D. degrees during the past ten to fifteen years. Moreover, in countries in which the degree is most popular, that popularity marks the reception of not only U.S. doctrinal models, but also theoretical and interdisciplinary scholarship as practiced at a small number of leading U.S. schools. These phenomena suggest important insights about the changing nature of U.S. legal education and its impact on a world stage

The Rise of an Academic Doctorate in Law: Origins Through World War II

The rise of the academic doctorate in law (a degree most U.S. scholars have either ignored or deprecated) is an important chapter in the story of law’s coming of age as an academic discipline in the first half of the 20th century. Drawing in part on continental European models, the architects of the degree shaped it into a vehicle for training a new class of law teachers, producing research into the nature and functioning of the legal system, and spreading emerging conceptions of law to a broader national audience. Notable among these conceptions were the “sociological jurisprudence” of Harvard’s Roscoe Pound and the Legal Realism of Columbia and Yale. This “missionary” function, however, was in tension with the implication of advanced scholarly work inherent in the degree’s name, and ultimately helped set the stage for the doctorate’s decline after World War II. While today it is much more common for U.S. law teachers to have pursued doctoral study in a discipline other than law, a U.S. doctorate in law is an increasingly attractive credential for foreign-trained lawyers who hope to teach in their home countries. This article is the first installment of a larger study that traces how U.S. legal education borrowed practices from overseas to create the degree, digested and modified them to suit the needs of a rapidly evolving legal system, then redirected the flow of ideas elsewhere. As such, the study is a story of the coming of age of U.S. legal education not just at home, but on a world stage

Using Cooperation Science to Strengthen Maine’s Local Food Economy

While Maine’s food system has enjoyed a recent surge in demand for local food, this opportunity for economic growth has been impeded by a difficult business climate for farmers, small business owners, and institutions. We believe this difficult business climate necessitates policy interventions to sustain the local food economy. Cooperation science can be used to tackle the social dilemmas persisting in Maine’s local food economy and buttress the argument for increased support from the state. In this article, we implement the framework of cooperation to address the key concerns of farm viability, business succession, and increased food sourcing in local institutions from local producers in Maine

Measuring well-being across Europe: Description of the ESS Well-being Module and preliminary findings

It has become customary to judge the success of a society through the use of objective indicators, predominantly economic and social ones. Yet in most developed nations, increases in income, education and health have arguably not produced comparable increases in happiness or life satisfaction. While much has been learned from the introduction of subjective measures of global happiness or life satisfaction into surveys, significant recent progress in the development of high-quality subjective measures of personal and social well-being has not been fully exploited. This paper describes the development of a set of well- being indicators which were included in Round 3 of the European Social Survey. This well-being Module seeks to evaluate the success of European countries in promoting the personal and social well-being of their citizens. In addition to providing a better understanding of domain-specific measures, such as those relating to family, work and income, the design of the Well-being Module recognises that advancement in the field requires us to look beyond measures which focus on how people feel (happiness, pleasure, satisfaction) to measures which are more concerned with how well they function. This also shifts the emphasis from relatively transient states of well-being to measures of more sustainable well-being. The ESS Well-being Module represents one of the first systematic attempts to create a set of policy-relevant national well-being accounts.well-being ; European social survey ; questionnaire design

Renormalization study of two-dimensional convergent solutions of the porous medium equation

In the focusing problem we study a solution of the porous medium equation $u_t=\Delta (u^m)$ whose initial distribution is positive in the exterior of a closed non-circular two dimensional region, and zero inside. We implement a numerical scheme that renormalizes the solution each time that the average size of the empty region reduces by a half. The initial condition is a function with circular level sets distorted with a small sinusoidal perturbation of wave number $k\geq 3$. We find that for nonlinearity exponents m smaller than a critical value which depends on k, the solution tends to a self-similar regime, characterized by rounded polygonal interfaces and similarity exponents that depend on m and on the discrete rotational symmetry number k. For m greater than the critical value, the final form of the interface is circular.Comment: 26 pages, Latex, 13 ps figure

Determination of the Michel Parameters rho, xi, and delta in tau-Lepton Decays with tau --> rho nu Tags

Using the ARGUS detector at the $e^+ e^-$ storage ring DORIS II, we have measured the Michel parameters $\rho$, $\xi$, and $\xi\delta$ for $\tau^{\pm}\to l^{\pm} \nu\bar\nu$ decays in $\tau$-pair events produced at center of mass energies in the region of the $\Upsilon$ resonances. Using $\tau^\mp \to \rho^\mp \nu$ as spin analyzing tags, we find $\rho_{e}=0.68\pm 0.04 \pm 0.08$, $\xi_{e}= 1.12 \pm 0.20 \pm 0.09$, $\xi\delta_{e}= 0.57 \pm 0.14 \pm 0.07$, $\rho_{\mu}= 0.69 \pm 0.06 \pm 0.08$, $\xi_{\mu}= 1.25 \pm 0.27 \pm 0.14$ and $\xi\delta_{\mu}= 0.72 \pm 0.18 \pm 0.10$. In addition, we report the combined ARGUS results on $\rho$, $\xi$, and $\xi\delta$ using this work und previous measurements.Comment: 10 pages, well formatted postscript can be found at http://pktw06.phy.tu-dresden.de/iktp/pub/desy97-194.p