The Political Economy of Urban Land Reform in Hawaii

In the mid 1960s there were about 22,000 single-family leasehold homes in Honolulu. Dissatisfaction with leasehold led to reform legislation in 1967, allowing lessees to buy leased land. By 1991 less than 5000 lessees remained. This paper examines why landowners elected to lease rather than sell land and attributes the rise of leasehold to legal constraints on land sales by large estates, duties of estate trustees and the federal tax code. Idelogical forces initiated land reform in 1967, but rent-seeking forces captured the process in the mid 1970s. It is concluded that Hawaii's experiment with leasehold was a failure due to the difficulties associated with specifying and enforcing long-term contracts in residential land.

Knowledge, skills and beetles: respecting the privacy of private experiences in medical education

In medical education, we assess knowledge, skills, and a third category usually called values or attitudes. While knowledge and skills can be assessed, this third category consists of ‘beetles’, after the philosopher Wittgenstein’s beetle-in-a-box analogy. The analogy demonstrates that private experiences such as pain and hunger are inaccessible to the public, and that we cannot know whether we all experience them in the same way. In this paper, we claim that unlike knowledge and skills, private experiences of medical learners cannot be objectively measured, assessed, or directly accessed in any way. If we try to do this anyway, we risk reducing them to knowledge and skills—thereby making curriculum design choices based on what can be measured rather than what is valuable education, and rewarding zombie-like student behaviour rather than authentic development. We conclude that we should no longer use the model of representation to assess attitudes, emotions, empathy, and other beetles. This amounts to, first of all, shutting the

Turkish imams and their role in decision-making in palliative care: A Directed Content and Narrative analysis

Background: Muslims are the largest religious minority in Europe. When confronted with life-threatening illness, they turn to their local imams for religious guidance. Aim: To gain knowledge about how imams shape their roles in decision-making in palliative care. Design: Direct Content Analysis through a typology of imam roles. To explore motives, this was complemented by Narrative Analysis. Setting/Participants: Ten Turkish imams working in the Netherlands, with experience in guiding congregants in palliative care. Results: The roles of Jurist, Exegete, Missionary, Advisor and Ritual Guide were identified. Three narratives emerged: Hope can work miracles, Responsibility needs to be shared, and Mask your grief. Participants urged patients not to consent to withholding or terminating treatment but to search for a cure, since this might be rewarded with miraculous healing. When giving consent seemed unavoidable, the fear of being held responsible by God for wrongful death was often managed by requesting fatwa from committees of religious experts. Relatives were urged to hide their grief from dying patients so they would not lose hope in God. Conclusion: Imams urge patients’ relatives to show faith in God by seeking maximum treatment. This attitude is motivated by the fear that all Muslims involved will be held accountable by God for questioning His omnipotence to heal. Therefore, doctors may be urged to offer treatment that contradicts medical standards for good palliative care. To bridge this gap, tailor-made palliative care should be developed in collaboration with imams. Future research might include imams of other Muslim organizations

The Hawaiian Home Lands Program: Return to the Land or Bureaucratic Cage?

Cook's contact with Hawaii in 1778 initiated a tragic decline in the Hawaiian population and sweeping changes in social, economic, and political institutions prompted by Hawaii's integration with the outside world. Increasing economic integration after 1860 with the United States, Hawaii's main market for sugar, was coupled with U.S. annexation of Hawaii in 1898. The economic conditions of Hawaiians declined through World War I, and a movement arose among Hawaiians to rectify their situation by returning to small farms on government lands. In 1921, the federal Hawaiian Homes Commission Act set aside approximately 5 percent of island land for Hawaiians satisfying a 50 percent blood quantum requirement. Hawaiian Home Lands (HHL) Program experiments with farming failed, and the Program's focus switched to providing improved housing lots and mortgage subsidies for Hawaiians. Expenditures on the HHL Program were relatively high in its first 15 years, declined markedly from World War II to the 1960s, and were volatile thereafter. Our analysis concludes that (1) government support for the HHL Program was roughly related to Hawaiians' numerical voting power and political organization; (2) the HHL program, with its home-lot production subsidies and alienability constraints, was inefficient and inequitable; and (3) there are high institutional barriers to fundamental reform.

Urban Land Price: The Extraordinary Case of Honolulu, Hawaii

The price of land in Honolulu is higher than in any other major U.S. urban area. In this paper we examine several determinants of the supply and demand for land and discuss their likely influence on Honolulu's land price. We utilize comparisons between demand and supply conditions in Honolulu and in the 40 most populous U.S. urban areas to ascertain the strength of the respective determinants. Our regression results confirm that natural and institutional constraints restricting the supply of land play an important role in determining price in Honolulu and in the 40-city sample.

Hawaiian Home Lands: Economic Waste, Cultural Preservation and Fundamental Reform

The Hawaiian Home Lands program enacted by the U.S. Congress in 1921 placed 200,000 acres of government land in trust for the use of native Hawaiians. This program - now with assets valued at well over $700 million - long ago evolved into a special type of public housing program in which the Hawaii territorial and then state governments developed, assigned and controlled the use of residential land. This article investigates the extent to which reform of the program could increase the value of benefits delivered to native Hawaiians. It builds on the economic literature on land and housing policy reform and Native American property rights. The reform alternatives that we analyze all employ the same total amount of program resources. The first alternative is lump-sum grants that provide fee title to existing homeowners, and money from the sale of other program assets to other native Hawaiians. Additional alternatives provide financial assistance for the rental and purchase of housing. The existing program and the proposed alternatives yield both private and public benefits. The public benefits are the inalienability of land which yields cultural and political externalities, and the more equitable distribution of program resources. Our quantitative estimates of private benefits reveal the extent of potential inefficiency in each program. We also determine the minimum value of the existing program's public benefits that would make it more beneficial to native Hawaiians than a lump-sum grant program.