U.S. Cultural Diplomacy and Archeology: Soft Power, Hard Heritage

The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 generated a maelstrom of images. There were cities lit by the “shock and awe” bombardment, the falling statues, the traumatized civilians and scene after scene of coalition forces vainly searching for weapons of mass destruction. But among the most peculiarly troubling were the images of the looting of Iraq’s national museum. The human suffering was sadly familiar to the TV audience around the world but the looting broke new ground. The images of looting spoke of the depth of the anarchy into which Iraq was tumbling. They represented the destruction of something greater than the immediate bricks and mortar, blood and bone of a twenty-first century nation; something ancient, irreplaceable and shared: a part of the heritage of all humanity. But the real political impact of those images came from the U.S. military’s failure to either anticipate the action (despite similar smaller incidents during the previous Gulf War) or to react to stop it. It seemed that American indifference had led to what the press dubbed “The greatest cultural disaster of the last 500 years.” The dismissive remark of the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that “stuff happens” added the final twist to a poisonous cocktail guaranteed to corrode the image of U.S. as benevolent, wise or respectful of other nations or even its own shared origins. The State Department noticed the disaster and set about a campaign to do what it could to correct the image of American ambivalence over the collective heritage of humanity. That work is a major focus of this book

Financial sector adjustment lending : a mid-course analysis

Nearly 100 countries have experienced bank insolvencies in the past 20 years. Weakness in the financial sectors of many countries is reflected in the size of the insolvencies -in many cases, the cost of bailout exceeded 15 percent of GDP- and the fact that these crises often recur. Because a strong financial sector is important for economic growth, the World Bank has increasingly granted loans with conditions attached to achieve specific financial sector reforms. The Bank often employs financial sector adjustment loans (FSALs) or, in poorer countries, credits (FSACs). FSALs are generally more comprehensive than other types of interventions and tend to concentrate on the reform areas most closely linked to the operations of deposit banks. Since 1990, their main focus has shifted from improving prudential regulations and correcting interest rate distortions to privatizing and recapitalizing banks. The author examines whether 1) initial conditions in a recipient country explain a substantial amount of the variation in intervention outcomes (as measured by post-intervention financial deepening) and 2) whether the changing nature of interventions has had implications for their success. He finds that: 1) the decline in post-intervention performance since 1990 cannot be attributed solely toinitial macroeconomic and financial sector conditions in the recipient country. 2) When initial macroeconomic and financial sector conditions were controlled for, certain types of reform, especially those dealing with prudential regulations, were associated with relatively large increases in the ration of money supply (M2) to GDP. Those dealing with recapitalization have also been relatively successful, especially when they also tackled prudential regulation or banking supervision. Those that focused on supervision did not, on average, substantially outperform those that did not, on average, focus on supervision. And reform focused on bank privatization was associated with much less financial deepening three years after the intervention. 3) In addition to reform aimed at institutional strengthening, the reform environment itself had a substantial impact on intervention outcomes. Financial deepening was positively associated with macroeconomic stability (low inflation) and an initially underdeveloped financial sector. 4) As the Bank's operational directives suggest, some macroeconomic stability is important for the success of financial sector interventions, especialy those that incorporate interest rate liberalization. While it may be best to move more aggressively on financial reform when macroeconomic circumstances are favorable,"visible"reform (such as privatization or interest rate deregulation) should be slowed down rather than abandoned in less fortunate circumstances. By contrast, less visible institution-building efforts should be continued regardless of macroeconomic conditions.Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Economic Theory&Research,Banks&Banking Reform,Environmental Economics&Policies,Financial Crisis Management&Restructuring,Economic Theory&Research,Banks&Banking Reform,Financial Crisis Management&Restructuring,Environmental Economics&Policies,Financial Economics

Using Linguistic Features to Estimate Suicide Probability of Chinese Microblog Users

If people with high risk of suicide can be identified through social media like microblog, it is possible to implement an active intervention system to save their lives. Based on this motivation, the current study administered the Suicide Probability Scale(SPS) to 1041 weibo users at Sina Weibo, which is a leading microblog service provider in China. Two NLP (Natural Language Processing) methods, the Chinese edition of Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) lexicon and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), are used to extract linguistic features from the Sina Weibo data. We trained predicting models by machine learning algorithm based on these two types of features, to estimate suicide probability based on linguistic features. The experiment results indicate that LDA can find topics that relate to suicide probability, and improve the performance of prediction. Our study adds value in prediction of suicidal probability of social network users with their behaviors

Dismissive incomprehension: a use of purported ignorance to undermine others

This paper analyses a particular social phenomenon whereby a speaker purports ignorance of the meaning of another speaker’s speech in order to undermine that other speaker: dismissive incomprehension. It develops a speech act theory of the phenomenon, and develops its distinctive, and sometimes problematic perlocutionary character. After taking a look at some of the issues surrounding the phenomenon, the paper compares it to more fully studied features of our social lives, including epistemic injustice and gaslighting. It ends with some thoughts on counteracting the problematic cases of dismissive incomprehension

Mutually Destructive Bidding: The FCC Auction Design Problem

Dissatisfaction with previous assignment mechanisms and the desire to raise revenue induced Congress to grant the FCC authority to auction radio licenses. The debate over an appropriate auction design was wide ranging with many imaginative proposals. Many of the arguments and their scientific support are unfortunately not publicly available. Here, we present our side of this debate for the record. Synergies across license valuations complicate the auction design process. Theory suggests that a “simple” (i.e., non-combinatorial) auction will have difficulty in assigning licenses efficiently in such an environment. This difficulty increases with increases in “fitting complexity.” In some environments, bidding may become “mutually destructive.” Experiments indicate that a combinatorial auction is superior to a simple auction in terms of economic efficiency and revenue generation in bidding environments with a low amount of fitting complexity. Concerns that a combinatorial auction will cause a “threshold” problem are not borne out when bidders for small packages can communicate