HENRY AGARD WALLACE, THE IOWA CORN YIELD TESTS, AND THE ADOPTION OF HYBRID CORN

This research report makes the following claims: 1] There was not an unambiguous economic advantage of hybrid corn over the open-pollinated varieties in 1936. 2] The early adoption of hybrid corn before 1937 can be better explained by a sustained propaganda campaign conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture at the direction of the Secretary of Agriculture, Henry Agard Wallace. The Department's campaign echoed that of the commercial seed companies. The most prominent hybrid seed company, Pioneer Hi-Bred Company, was founded by Wallace and he retained a financial interest while serving as Secretary. 3] The early adopters of hybrid seed were followed by later adopters as a consequence of the droughts of 1934 and especially 1936. The eventual improvement of yields as newer varieties were introduced explains the continuation and acceleration of the process.

Slave Breeding

This paper reviews the historical work on slave breeding in the ante-bellum United States. Slave breeding consisted of interference in the sexual life of slaves by their owners with the intent and result of increasing the number of slave children born. The weight of evidence suggests that slave breeding occurred in sufficient force to raise the rate of growth of the American slave population despite evidence that only a minority of slave-owners engaged in such practices

One Kind of Freedom: Reconsidered (and Turbo Charged)

Since One Kind of Freedom was published in 1977 there have been enormous advances in computer technology and statistical software, and an impressive expansion of micro-level historical data sets. In this essay we reconsider' our earlier findings on the consequences of emancipation in terms of what might be accomplished using the new technology, methods, and data. We employ the entire sample of 11,202 farms collected for the Southern Economic History Project not the sub-sample used to prepare 1KF. We revisit the question of declining production of foodstuffs, examining the data this time on a farm-by-farm basis. We conclude that 30 percent of farms in the cotton regions were locked-in' to cotton production and another 16 percent were producing too much food in an effort to avoid the trap of debt peonage. Using probit methods to control for the effects of age, farm size, literacy, family workers, and willingness to assume risk, we find that race accounts for two-thirds of the gap between black and white ownership of farms. Comparing sharecropping and renting, we find that race was much less of a factor in tenure choice. We note that these efforts only scratch the surface of what remains to be done.

Freedom, power and the global economic order

This article develops arguments found in chapter six of Freedom Is Power: Liberty through Political Representation, concerning how Hamilton’s account of freedom might inform our thinking about global justice. Hamilton’s work grapples with the problem of domination and freedom in a postapartheid and postcolonial world order. While we find important statements of this theme in some of the canonical texts of the tradition, Hamilton’s treatment of the theme hints at a further reaching, more demanding engagement with “real modern freedom”— freedom in the vast shadow of economic, political, and cultural domination. This contribution seeks to place his work within debates in normative international political theory and to compare his position (and its implications) with those arguing for normative and institutional change in world politics including questions of distributive justice and global economic governance

Resident Impacts of Immigration: Perspectives from America’s Age of Mass Migration

Elementary economic models are often used to suggest that immigration depresses the wages of native-born workers. These models assume that when immigrants enter a labour market, all other features of that market remain unchanged. Such an assumption is almost never valid. Here we explore the economic impacts of immigrants during America’s Age of Mass Migration a century ago. This was a period of dynamic structural change that witnessed the appearance of new industries, adoption of new technologies, discovery of new mineral resources, the rise of big business, and the geographic concentration of industries. We show that immigrants – and residents – selected destinations where labour demand and wages were rising. Thus, native workers experienced wage increases in the presence of heavy immigration. Models that abstract from the special characteristics of labour markets that attract immigrants misrepresent their economic impact.Immigration, Internal migration, Economic history of immigration, Counterfactual analysis

Decoherence induced CPT violation and entangled neutral mesons

We discuss two classes of semi-microscopic theoretical models of stochastic space-time foam in quantum gravity and the associated effects on entangled states of neutral mesons, signalling an intrinsic breakdown of CPT invariance. One class of models deals with a specific model of foam, initially constructed in the context of non-critical (Liouville) string theory, but viewed here in the more general context of effective quantum-gravity models. The relevant Hamiltonian perturbation, describing the interaction of the meson with the foam medium, consists of off-diagonal stochastic metric fluctuations, connecting distinct mass eigenstates (or the appropriate generalisation thereof in the case of K-mesons), and it is proportional to the relevant momentum transfer (along the direction of motion of the meson pair). There are two kinds of CPT-violating effects in this case, which can be experimentally disentangled: one (termed ``omega-effect'') is associated with the failure of the indistinguishability between the neutral meson and its antiparticle, and affects certain symmetry properties of the initial state of the two-meson system; the second effect is generated by the time evolution of the system in the medium of the space-time foam, and can result in time-dependent contributions of the $omega-effect type in the time profile of the two meson state. Estimates of both effects are given, which show that, at least in certain models, such effects are not far from the sensitivity of experimental facilities available currently or in the near future. The other class of quantum gravity models involves a medium of gravitational fluctuations which behaves like a ``thermal bath''. In this model both of the above-mentioned intrinsic CPT violation effects are not valid.Comment: 16 pages revtex, no figure

The slow normalisation of normative political theory

Reflecting upon the twenty-five years since the cosmopolitan/communitarian distinction provided initial focus to the (re)emergence of International Political Theory (IPT), two things stand out. First, despite the many well-founded criticisms of the way the cosmopolitan/communitarian debate conceived of the theoretical debates in IPT, it has proven remarkably difficult to escape or transcend the core features of cosmopolitanism and communitarianism in IPT. Second, the critical work done in response to the challenges of the early debates has left a more mature and refined IPT. Some of the most interesting and important work is now happening at the interface between IPT and empirical, sociological, and legal studies in IR. It is here, this chapter contends, that the contemporary debates between cosmopolitans engaging with the socio-legal fabric of international society and new-communitarians engaging with the normative implications of evolving transnational and global communities are effecting the normalization of IPT.</p

Challenge Accepted! Going Gameful to Develop Soft Skills

Students at the University of Michigan-Dearborn are leveraging the connections among their learning and living experiences by reflecting in the online Talent Gateway, a “gameful learning” approach to career readiness. In this program, students earn points towards the (M)Talent distinction on their official transcript as they learn to recognize and articulate existing skills while also developing new skills required in today\u27s workplace such as critical and creative thinking, problem-solving, collaboration, digital literacy, and global fluency