Immigration, Political Community, and Cosmopolitanism

In this Article, I want to suggest one important way to take the above issues seriously that is consistent with a thoroughgoing cosmopolitanism. The idea develops a consideration that has been discussed, but not sufficiently explored, by some cosmopolitans. It starts from the observation that one can be a moral cosmopolitan without being a political cosmopolitan in the sense of advocating for a global political community in the near-term future. To be sure, given the role of the political community in establishing justice among persons, it seems clear that in the long term, moral cosmopolitans must hope for a global political community. In the near-to-medium term, however, efforts to establish a global political community would be quite premature and would probably lead to the kinds of oppression and anomie that Kant worried about. Still, the aspiration to a global political community in the long run and the steps necessary to achieve this aim may give us some guidance as to how to think about the migration of peoples from the point of view of moral cosmopolitanism

Legitimacy and the International Trade Regime

Issues of global justice and trade are usually dealt with in terms of what a just system of trade is like and what the distribution of income, opportunities, or welfare ought to be. But the question I address and explore is what a legitimate way of making decisions in the international realm is. This issue has arisen acutely in the case of the formation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and other international institutions. In particular, many have complained that developed countries engaged in hard bargaining with developing countries in the conferences that led up to the formation of the WTO, thereby engaging in unfair and undemocratic methods for reaching agreements between developing and developed societies. They have complained that these methods have damaged the legitimacy of the WTO. I want to try to understand the nature of this complaint by attempting to elaborate and defend some basic principles of fair negotiation. In this Article, I will lay out a conception of legitimacy in international institutions. The basic framework from which I proceed is morally cosmopolitan and democratic. Therefore, the conception of legitimacy will include an egalitarian method for making decisions. The main purpose here will be to explore the shape of this egalitarian method and what it would mean for the case of interstate negotiation. This has proven to be a hard nut to crack so the results of this paper will be exploratory and will not issue in a complete account, but rather in a set of observations and partial principles about what a just method of decision might be. The account is somewhat fragmentary and it does not give much in the way of guidance as to how to implement the principles in actual rules for collective decision-making. First, I lay out a conception of legitimacy for the international system that is broadly cosmopolitan and democratic, though it attempts to start with the idea of state consent. The basic project here is to explore how the process of state consent, which is after all the most important source of legal legitimacy in the international system, must be qualified and modified in order for it to satisfy some basic democratic and cosmopolitan principles. I defend the centrality of state consent and consensualism generally against various majoritarian approaches to international collective decision-making. I then set forth some principles for evaluating the fairness of individual agreement making. From there I attempt to see how far this idea can be extended to interstate negotiation. I point out the insights and limits of this extension. I then discuss the formation of the WTO, highlighting some of the difficulties of legitimacy and then articulate some basic power apportionment principles for international negotiation. This account is still incomplete and does not yet shed light on how to apply the principles so as to construct collective decision-making mechanisms for international treaty making

Democracy, Participation, and Information: Complementarity Between Political and Economic Institutions

In this Article, I will first lay out what I describe as the crude Downsian approach to political democracy and the skepticism about democracy that this has generated. Then, I will lay out some basic problems with this approach and show how the skepticism is not warranted. I will then embark on the task of developing an alternative Downsian approach to political democracy that I think is truer to Downs’s view and that is more sophisticated and interesting. This will include a brief sketch of motivation, and an account of the economics of information in politics. I will then try to show that the skepticism that is expressed as a result of the crude Downsian approach is not warranted on the more sophisticated approach. Finally, I will argue that the enhancement of workers’ voice in the workplace, either through union representation or through more direct forms of participation, can have a significant impact on the quality of participation in political democracy and can enhance the political power of workers. I will try to show how the more sophisticated Downsian picture can generate this result and I will advance some empirical evidence to this effect. All of this is a way of meshing philosophical ideas with analytical and empirical social science, which I will try to articulate in the Article. At the very end, I will handle some objections to the approach

Democracia y derechos liberales

En este artículo intentaré proporcionar un argumento fundamental a favor de la democracia y un argumento a favor de algunos de los derechos liberales básicos. En el proceso demostraré que el argumento a favor de la democracia está basado en las mismas premisas que el argumento a favor de los derechos liberales. Hay, como argumentaré, un paralelismo fundamental entre la justificación de la democracia y la justificación de los derechos liberales básicos. Esto tiene consecuencias importantes para la relación entre la democracia y las libertades básicas. Aunque no intentaré mostrar esto aquí, el paralelismo entre la justificación de los derechos liberales y la justificación de los derechos democráticos refuerza una explicación de la autoridad de la democracia y los límites de esa autoridad

Skill-biased technological change and the business cycle

Over the past two decades, technological progress in the United States has been biased towards skilled labor. What does this imply for business cycles? We construct a quarterly skill premium from the CPS and use it to identify skill-biased technology shocks in a VAR with long-run zero and sign restrictions. Hours fall in response to skill-biased technology shocks, indicating that part of the technology-induced fall in hours is due to a compositional shift in labor demand. Investment-specific technology shocks reduce the skill premium, indicating that capital and skill are not complementary in aggregate production

A Cryptographic Test of Quantumness and Certifiable Randomness from a Single Quantum Device

We give a protocol for producing certifiable randomness from a single untrusted quantum device that is polynomial-time bounded. The randomness is certified to be statistically close to uniform from the point of view of any computationally unbounded quantum adversary, that may share entanglement with the quantum device. The protocol relies on the existence of post-quantum secure trapdoor claw-free functions, and introduces a new primitive for constraining the power of an untrusted quantum device. We then show how to construct this primitive based on the hardness of the learning with errors (LWE) problem. The randomness protocol can also be used as the basis for an efficiently verifiable "quantum supremacy" proposal, thus answering an outstanding challenge in the field

A Cryptographic Test of Quantumness and Certifiable Randomness from a Single Quantum Device

We give a protocol for producing certifiable randomness from a single untrusted quantum device that is polynomial-time bounded. The randomness is certified to be statistically close to uniform from the point of view of any computationally unbounded quantum adversary, that may share entanglement with the quantum device. The protocol relies on the existence of post-quantum secure trapdoor claw-free functions, and introduces a new primitive for constraining the power of an untrusted quantum device. We then show how to construct this primitive based on the hardness of the learning with errors (LWE) problem. The randomness protocol can also be used as the basis for an efficiently verifiable "quantum supremacy" proposal, thus answering an outstanding challenge in the field

Мультимодальное лечение двусторонних опухолей почек как способ улучшения онкологических и функциональных результатов: клинический случай и обзор литературы

Почечно-клеточный рак (ПКР) может поражать как одну, так и обе почки. Описаны случаи мультифокального поражения одной почки. Синхронные и метахронные двусторонние опухоли почек представляют серьезную медицинскую проблему, которая должна быть решена наилучшим путем с точки зрения радикальности лечения и максимального сохранения функции почек. Мы представляем описание клинического случая метахронного ПКР с рецидивом в ипсилатеральной и контралатеральной почке. У этого пациента было использовано несколько методик, направленных на сохранение функции нефронов. Был проведен обзор литературы по заболеваемости, лечению и исходам синхронного и метахронного ПКР, а также по вариантам лечения, доступным таким больным. Мы использовали сочетание открытых и малоинвазивных методик, направленных на сохранение функции почек, включая открытую резекцию почки и лапароскопическую криотерапию. По прошествии 5 лет наблюдения пациент не имеет признаков болезни и ему не требуется проведение гемодиализа. Двусторонние опухоли почек встречаются нередко и могут представлять значительную проблему при выборе методов лечения с учетом необходимости сохранения функции почек. Результаты лечения можно улучшить при использовании мультимодального подхода, включающего малоинвазивные и открытые процедуры.

A Fiscal Stimulus and Jobless Recovery

We analyze the effects of a government-spending expansion in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with Mortensen–Pissarides labor-market frictions, deep habits in private and public consumption, investment adjustment costs, a constant elasticity of substitution (CES) production function, and adjustments in employment at both intensive and extensive margins. The combination of deep habits and CES technology is crucial. The presence of deep habits magnifies the responses of macroeconomic variables to a fiscal stimulus, while an elasticity of substitution between capital and labor in the range of available estimates allows the model to produce a scenario compatible with the observed jobless recovery