Philosophy against National Socialism: Hannah Arendt und Karl Jaspers. 'The few cannot be too few' - On the 'spirit of uninhibited humanity' - material from a research programme

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Altruistic bequests and non-negative savings

This paper builds on the class of models studying the game interaction between an altruistic benefactor and a selfish recipient. An altruistic parent's bequest is transferred to his selfish son after the former's death and we assume that it is not a valid collateral for bank loans. This is equivalent to adding a non-negativity constraint on savings to the standard bequest model. A crucial mechanism at work is that the son's choice of a level of action can seriously dwarf his budget set. When Becker's resuit holds, the credit constraint places an upper bound on the strategie savings of the Samaritan's dilemma type. But the constraint on savings also causes the shrinkage of the validity domain of the Rotten Kid Theorem because it may lead both poor and rich heirs to behave unoptimally from the family point of view.Altruism, Liquidity constraints

Repulsive Casimir forces and the role of surface modes

The Casimir repulsion between a metal and a dielectric suspended in a liquid has been thoroughly studied in recent experiments. In the present paper we consider surface modes in three layered systems modeled by dielectric functions guaranteeing repulsion. It is shown that surface modes play a decisive role in this phenomenon at short separations. For a toy plasma model we find the contribution of the surface modes at all distances.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures, submitted to PR

Unmarried adolescents and filial assistance in eighteenth-century Flanders

Service was one of the main characteristics of the European Marriage Pattern in pre-industrial western Europe. During this stage of the life cycle adolescents could acquire the material assets and skills that were required to marry and start an independent household. Whilst in service, servants could save between 40 and 60 per cent of their cash wage. This paper illustrates that servants also used their earnings to assist their families. Parents of servants in particular could rely on both remittances in cash and in kind. As such, placing children in service was also a source of income for peasant household in Flanders. I argue that both patterns of land ownership and the restricted access to welfare ressources explain why servants displayed this altruistic behaviour.adolescents, farm servants, saving, Flanders, family assistance, poor relief, household formation, European Marriage Pattern,