Financial diversification before modern portfolio theory: UK financial advice documents in the late nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century

The paper offers textual evidence from a series of financial advice documents in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century of how UK investors perceived of and managed risk. In the world’s largest financial centre of the time, UK investors were familiar with the concept of correlation and financial advisers’ suggestions were consistent with the recommendations of modern portfolio theory in relation to portfolio selection strategies. From the 1870s, there was an increased awareness of the benefits of financial diversification - primarily putting equal amounts into a number of different securities - with much of the emphasis being on geographical rather than sectoral diversification and some discussion of avoiding highly correlated investments. Investors in the past were not so naïve as mainstream financial discussions suggest today

Visual methodologies, sand and psychoanalysis: employing creative participatory techniques to explore the educational experiences of mature students and children in care

Social science research has witnessed an increasing move towards visual methods of data production. However, some visual techniques remain pariah sites because of their association with psychoanalysis; and a reluctance to engage with psychoanalytically informed approaches outside of therapy based settings. This paper introduces the method of ‘sandboxing’, which was developed from the psychoanalytical approach of the ‘world technique’. ‘Sandboxing’ provides an opportunity for participants to create three-dimensional scenes in sand-trays, employing miniature figures and everyday objects. Data is presented from two studies conducted in Wales, UK. The first, exploring mature students’ accounts of higher education, and the second, exploring the educational experiences of children and young people in public care. The paper argues that psychoanalytical work can be adapted to enable a distinctive, valuable and ethical tool of qualitative inquiry; and illustrates how ‘sandboxing’ engendered opportunities to fight familiarity, enabled participatory frameworks, and contributed to informed policy and practice

A multimeasure approach to investigating affective appraisal of social information in Williams syndrome

People with Williams syndrome (WS) have been consistently described as showing heightened sociability, gregariousness, and interest in people, in conjunction with an uneven cognitive profile and mild to moderate intellectual or learning disability. To explore the mechanisms underlying this unusual social–behavioral phenotype, we investigated whether individuals with WS show an atypical appraisal style and autonomic responsiveness to emotionally laden images with social or nonsocial content. Adolescents and adults with WS were compared to chronological age-matched and nonverbal mental age-matched groups in their responses to positive and negative images with or without social content, using measures of self-selected viewing time (SSVT), autonomic arousal reflected in pupil dilation measures, and likeability ratings. The participants with WS looked significantly longer at the social images compared to images without social content and had reduced arousal to the negative social images compared to the control groups. In contrast to the comparison groups, the explicit ratings of likeability in the WS group did not correlate with their SSVT; instead, they reflected an appraisal style of more extreme ratings. This distinctive pattern of viewing interest, likeability ratings, and autonomic arousal to images with social content in the WS group suggests that their heightened social drive may be related to atypical functioning of reward-related brain systems reflected in SSVT and autonomic reactivity measures, but not in explicit ratings

Does the WTO Violate Human Rights (and Do I Help It)? Beyond the Metaphor of Culpability for Systemic Global Poverty

I challenge an influential analysis (the ‘participation account’) that attributes human rights violations to the global economic system, and attributes complicity with those violations to citizens of affluent countries. The participation account is shown to rest on a faulty account of wrongful action. An alternative, and superior, account of wrongful action (the ‘agency account’) is proposed, and used to analyse the rules of the global economic order. These include the ‘foreground rules’ of trade agreements and the ‘background rules’ of state privileges. The agency account identifies wrongful action with unreasonably imposing losses/risks. The systemic bad effects of the economic system and its rules are shown not to be due to agents in the system acting unreasonably in this sense. The metaphor that the economic system ‘violates rights’ and that we act in complicity with this are thus shown not to stand up to analysis