An uncertain dollar: The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the monetary crisis of 1971 to 1973

In August 15, 1971, President Nixon announced the unilateral suspension of the convertibility of the dollar into gold, a foundation of the world monetary system since the Second World War. The media and economic experts were caught by surprise, neither could foresee the immediate consequences of the decision or what would be the architecture of the emerging international monetary system. From 1971 to 1973, the money markets and the value of the dollar became a news, an opinion, an editorial item in both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. I examine this record to question how was anxiety about the dollar resolved in media communication? Media narratives were not uniform between and within the two newspapers. What distinguished the Times and Journal's coverage was their diverse framing of the dollar as political, financial or economic object. I conclude that media uncertainty about the dollar was less an outcome of failing expert knowledge as it was a consequence of the dollar's multiple cultural significations.Economic Journalism, dollar, Smithsonian, Nixon shock, media narratives

Tratamento da humidade ascendente em paredes

O desempenho das paredes das edificações relativamente a humidade ascendente afecta directamente as construções e o património edificado. Ao longo do tempo, existe uma degradação progressiva das paredes, ate que deixam de conseguir cumprir as funções de impermeabilização, protecção e acabamento que lhe são exigidas. A avaliação das diferentes metodologias de reparação de paredes afectadas por humidade ascensional tem sido desde o passado um problema de difícil resolução, tanto pela multiplicidade de factores intervenientes na sua ocorrência, como pela dificuldade de aferir quais as metodologias adequadas a cada caso. Nesta perspectiva, o conhecimento do fenómeno e as suas causas e fundamental. Este trabalho pretende aprofundar o conhecimento existente sobre a utilização de métodos de tratamento de paredes com humidade ascensional, e propõe uma metodologia de análise a aplicabilidade das técnicas utilizadas, bem como a sua sensibilidade aos factores envolvidos nessa utilização

The Solow residual as a black box : attempts at integrating business cycle and growth theories

The intersection between growth and business cycle theory remains a controversial subject in economics. The question posed by this article is, What role did Robert Solow’s “Technical Change and the Aggregate Production Function” (1957) play in recent attempts to integrate business cycle and growth theory? We argue that the “Solow residual” was a resource given to multiple uses, at times rhetorical and symbolic, at times instrumental for theory development, at others a social artifact. On the history of models that bring growth and fluctuation into a single frame, we have focused on the uses and meanings of a particularly prominent object: the Solow residual. The significance of Solow’s 1957 work arose from having stabilized a method and result, the residual as reproducible object, a black box. This object was shown to traffic liberally across doctrinal divides in economics. Once on offer, the black box had a life of its own. Its relation to the original context and to the intentions and beliefs of its originator was severed. So while Denison used the residual in ways that were surely faithful to Solow, the new classicals employed it in ways that seemed counter to Solow’s outlook. While the residual had always remained a problematic result in growth accounting, its borrowing by real business cycle theorists sought to establish it as a definitive representation of technology. Furthermore, in these models it was a short-run and stochastic technology, a novel and surprising interpretationinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Cultures of Expertise and the Public Interventions of Economists

The essays in this volume examine the economist as public intellectual. Rather than assessing the changing status of the public intellectual in culture or attempting to define the identity of the public intellectual, our approach is to study the public interventions of economists, that is, the encounters between economists and their publics. In the volume we constrain ourselves to the long twentieth century in the United States and the United Kingdom, fenced at one end by the Progressive Era and Fabianism and the ongoing economic crisis at the other. Economists then and now have been occupants of the public sphere, and to understand their encounters with the public we must appreciate the expectations they bring to the meeting and the institutional contexts that enable the encounters. The unifying claim of our collection is that economists’ public interventions have been of profound consequence for both the structure and the content of the public sphere.</jats:p

New contributions on flora and vegetation of northeastern Portugal ultramafic outcrops

In this work we present some syntaxonomic novelties on the vegetation of the referred ultramafic outcrops focused on three new associations: Jonopsidio abulensis-Sedetum maireani, Armerio daveaui-Agrostietum castellanae and Seseli peixotoani- Avenuletum lusitanicae; in addition, a new nomenclatural combination of an endemic taxon from the Morais massif (Armeria langei subsp. marizii) is proposed. We also clarify the phytocoenotic structure of the Portuguese vegetation series through a simple diagrammatic representation, which is then applied to one unique climatophilous vegetation series present in the ultramafic rocks of northeastern Portugal: Genisto hystricis-Querco rotundifoliae Sigmetuminfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Slums and Pandemics

How do slums shape the economic and health dynamics of pandemics? A difference-in-differences analysis using millions of mobile phones in Brazil shows that residents of overcrowded slums engaged in less social distancing after the outbreak of Covid-19. We develop and calibrate a choice-theoretic equilibrium model in which individuals are heterogeneous in income and some people live in high-density slums. Slum residents account for a disproportionately high number of infections and deaths and, without slums, deaths increase in non-slum neighborhoods. Policy analysis of reallocation of medical resources, lockdowns and cash transfers produce heterogeneous effects across groups. Policy simulations indicate that: reallocating medical resources cuts deaths and raises output and the welfare of both groups; mild lockdowns favor slum individuals by mitigating the demand for hospital beds, whereas strict confinements mostly delay the evolution of the pandemic; and cash transfers benefit slum residents to the detriment of others, highlighting important distributional effects

Dissent in economics: Making radical political economics and post Keynesian economics, 1960-1980.

The history of dissent in economics has thus far been subject to scant interest. The existing scholarship, authored by dissenters probing their own past, has failed to address the crucial questions of how dissent emerged and rooted itself. This study is about two dissenting communities, Radical Political Economics and Post Keynesian Economics. I review the circumstances that led to their emergence in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I draw from the histories of religious and scientific dissent to explore the making of the dissenters' challenge to the economics orthodoxy. Notably, I use the concept of boundary work to analyse the debates between dissenters and mainstream. The history of Radical Political Economics begins with the founding in 1968 of the Union for Radical Political Economics. Onto this Union converged a generation of young radicalised academics that sought to unite their political interests and their scholarly pursuits. After a period devoted to the design of a "paradigm of conflict," radicals turned to outreach work with popular movements. The new commitment brought divisive political identities into their Union that barred any agreement on a programme to transform economics. Post Keynesian Economics emerged in the aftermath of debates on capital theory between Cambridge left Keynesians and neoclassical economists. With the conviction that the debates signalled the emergence of a new theory in economics, American dissenters decided to ally with the Cambridge critics. The content of the alliance was redefined many times in the 1970s by a succession of spokespersons for the group. Of this period resulted a weakly bound community joined by a sense of shared ancestry. The two case studies reveal the diverse resources and allies that dissenters mustered for their battle with the economics orthodoxy. They show how the dissenters' challenge shaped the boundaries of their communities and the content of their identity

Estudo biomecânico da articulação do joelho

Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Macânica. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200

Using metacognitive cues to infer others’ thinking

Three studies tested whether people use cues about the way other people think—for example, whether others respond fast vs. slow—to infer what responses other people might give to reasoning problems. People who solve reasoning problems using deliberative thinking have better insight than intuitive problem-solvers into the responses that other people might give to the same problems. Presumably because deliberative responders think of intuitive responses before they think of deliberative responses, they are aware that others might respond intuitively, particularly in circumstances that hinder deliberative thinking (e.g., fast responding). Intuitive responders, on the other hand, are less aware of alternative responses to theirs, so they infer that other people respond as they do, regardless of the way others respond