Book review: The US financial crisis: analysis andinterpretation: lessons for China

Cheng Siwei evaluates the effects of China’s countermeasures to the financial crisis and identifies the excessive growth of ‘fictitious capital’, a concept developed by Karl Marx, as its root cause. Joel Suss finds that while the author does provide excellent economic policy advice, he does not spell out policies that may shore up credibility and stop panic from spreading

Book review: media and social justice by Sue Curry Jansen, Jefferson Pooley, and Lora Taub-Pervizpour

Media and Social Justice charts the work that critical media scholars and activists are undertaking to combat social injustice and misrepresentation in the media. The authors provide a diverse collection of examples, but conclude that there is still a long way to go before we can fully eliminate abuses of power. An excellent guide for students, with several interesting and innovative chapters, discovers Joel Sus

Canada’s Parti Québécois is playing a dangerous game in pursuit of a majority in Quebec

On April 7th, the people of the Canadian province of Québec will go to the polls in a snap election called by the governing Parti Québécois. Joel Suss argues that the election and its timing is an attempt by the Parti Québécois’ leader Pauline Marois to take advantage of support for its controversial charter of secularism, which would ban all displays of religious affiliation in public institutions. He writes that if the Parti Québécois is successful in its bid for re-election, Québec may soon be seeing a third referendum on the province’s future within Canada

Five minutes with Patrick Dunleavy: “The Treasury have woefully misapplied our research estimates”

In late May 2014, the UK Treasury released a press release ahead of a major report UK minsters were issuing on the costs of setting up an independent Scottish state. Joel Suss, Managing Editor of British Politics and Policy blog, asks Patrick Dunleavy about the way in which the Treasury used his research findings to arrive at a figure of £2.7 billion, and about his Twitter intervention raising concerns about it, which caused a furore. How did this episode come about, and does it serve to illustrate the problems of mis-communication between civil servants and researchers

Using a Prediction and Option Generation Paradigm to Understand Decision Making

In many complex and dynamic domains, the ability to generate and then select the appropriate course of action is based on the decision maker\u27s reading of the situation--in other words, their ability to assess the situation and predict how it will evolve over the next few seconds. Current theories regarding option generation during the situation assessment and response phases of decision making offer contrasting views on the cognitive mechanisms that support superior performance. The Recognition-Primed Decision-making model (RPD; Klein, 1989) and Take-The-First heuristic (TTF; Johnson & Raab, 2003) suggest that superior decisions are made by generating few options, and then selecting the first option as the final one. Long-Term Working Memory theory (LTWM; Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995), on the other hand, posits that skilled decision makers construct rich, detailed situation models, and that as a result, skilled performers should have the ability to generate more of the available task-relevant options. The main goal of this dissertation was to use these theories about option generation as a way to further the understanding of how police officers anticipate a perpetrator\u27s actions, and make decisions about how to respond, during dynamic law enforcement situations. An additional goal was to gather information that can be used, in the future, to design training based on the anticipation skills, decision strategies, and processes of experienced officers. Two studies were conducted to achieve these goals. Study 1 identified video-based law enforcement scenarios that could be used to discriminate between experienced and less-experienced police officers, in terms of their ability to anticipate the outcome. The discriminating scenarios were used as the stimuli in Study 2; 23 experienced and 26 less-experienced police officers observed temporally-occluded versions of the scenarios, and then completed assessment and response option-generation tasks. The results provided mixed support for the nature of option generation in these situations. Consistent with RPD and TTF, participants typically selected the first-generated option as their final one, and did so during both the assessment and response phases of decision making. Consistent with LTWM theory, participants--regardless of experience level--generated more task-relevant assessment options than task-irrelevant options. However, an expected interaction between experience level and option-relevance was not observed. Collectively, the two studies provide a deeper understanding of how police officers make decisions in dynamic situations. The methods developed and employed in the studies can be used to investigate anticipation and decision making in other critical domains (e.g., nursing, military). The results are discussed in relation to how they can inform future studies of option-generation performance, and how they could be applied to develop training for law enforcement officers

Measuring local, salient economic inequality in the UK

Neighbourhood-level economic inequality is thought to have important implications for social, political, and economic attitudes and behaviours. However, due to a lack of available data, to date it has been impossible to investigate how inequality varies across neighbourhoods in the UK. In this paper, I develop a novel measure of within-neighbourhood inequality in the UK by exploiting data on housing values for over 26.6 million addresses – nearly the universe of residential properties in the UK. Across two surveys, I demonstrate that housing value inequality is perceptually-salient – what people see around them in terms of housing discrepancies is associated with their beliefs about inequality. This new measure of local, salient inequality represents a powerful tool with which to investigate both the anatomy of local inequality in the UK, as well as its attitudinal and behavioural consequences

Does economic inequality fuel stop and search by the police? Evidence from London suggests the answer is ‘Yes'

Police officers more frequently stop and search members of the public in neighbourhoods where well-off and economically precarious people co-exist. Joel H. Suss and Thiago R. Oliveira show that this pattern holds up even when accounting for other important factors, such as previous local crime rates and a neighbourhood’s ethnic makeup. Although the evidence is that stop and search activity does little to reduce crime, the police persist with the practice in order to maintain social order

Understanding salient inequality in London

While much has been said about the rise in economic inequality in the UK and many other developed countries over the last several decades, very little is understood about how inequality is experienced by individuals. This research maps salient inequality in London and examines its consequences

Five minutes with Amartya Sen: “I think that Piketty’s conclusions mostly stand”

In an interview with British Politics and Policy at LSE’s editor Joel Suss and EUROPP’s editor Stuart Brown, Amartya Sen discusses Thomas Piketty’s recent work, the consequences of widening inequality, and his views on India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose BJP party won the country’s 2014 general election

Five minutes with George Galloway: “The West is guilty of deep, laughable hypocrisy over Crimea”

George Galloway is a long-time anti-war campaigner and Member of the UK Parliament for Bradford West, having won a 2012 by-election as a member of the Respect Party. In an interview with Stuart Brown and Joel Suss, editors of EUROPP and the British Politics and Policy at LSE blog, he discusses events in Ukraine, the future of UK foreign policy, the Snowden revelations, and Scottish independence