Strangers in Arms: Combat Motivation in the Canadian Army, 1943-1945 (Book Review) by Robert Engen

Review of Strangers in Arms: Combat Motivation in the Canadian Army, 1943-1945 by Robert Engen

Invisible Scars: Mental Trauma and the Korean War (Book Review) by Meghan Fitzpatrick

Review of Invisible Scars: Mental Trauma and the Korean War by Meghan Fitzpatrick

"Encystation": Containment and Control in Israeli Ideology and Practice

The radical closure of Gaza serves here as an extreme example of a process of isolation and immiseration of national enemies that is deeply rooted in Israeli ideology and practices of state formation. I use encystation to reveal the dual meaning of the term—that of radical isolation of diseased elements and that of protecting a fetus within a womb—and to show how the two meanings connect with respective Israeli policies toward Palestinians and Jews. I suggest in closing that the Oslo Accords have put in place mechanisms for the future imposition on West Bank Palestinians of the same containment currently afflicting Gaz

Experimental Methods and the Welfare Evaluation of Policy Lotteries

Policies impose lotteries of outcomes on individuals, since we never know exactly what the effects of the policy will be. In order to evaluate alternative policies, we therefore need to make some assumptions about individual preferences, even before social welfare functions are applied. Instead of making a priori assumptions about those preferences that are likely to be wrong, there are two broad ways in which experimental methods are used to evaluate policy. One is to use experiments to estimate individual preferences, valuations and beliefs, and use those estimates as priors in the evaluation of policy. The other approach is to undertake deliberate randomization, or exploit accidental or natural randomization, to infer the effects of policy. The strengths and weaknesses of these approaches are reviewed, and their complementarities identified.