Business and Economics

With the advancement of new technology, labor productivity has increased over the past several decades. However, the distributional consequence of high technology advancement causes large rise in income inequality since the late 1970s. One important reason is that information technology changes the production process and creates skill premium for labors that have the human capital to complement well with the technology in the production process. For those who do not have such human capital, their income growth stagnates and income inequality in the society rises. To better understand the income inequality and how technology affects it in the recent decade, this paper provides a direct look at how High Tech Industries contribute to income inequality by decomposing the Lorenz curve . Moreover, by decomposing the associated concentration curve, the paper investigates how income inequality evolves time and how High Tech Industries affect this change.

In the SPEAK test, you will be able to demonstrate how well you speak English. The test will last approximately twenty minutes. You will be asked questions by an interviewer. The questions are printed in the test book and the time you will have to answer each one is printed in parentheses after the question. You are encouraged to answer the questions as completely as possible in the time allowed. While most of the questions on the test may not appear to be directly related to your academic or professional field, each question is designed to tell the raters about your oral language ability. The raters will evaluate how well you communicate in English.

There is a near universal consensus among historians that the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) was central in shaping the American landscape. Its putative anti-urban bias is used to explain both the rise of white, middle-class suburbs and the decline of increasingly impoverished and increasingly nonwhite central cities. This article argues that this consensus misreads the history of the FHA for two related reasons. First, it argues that pressure from urban politicians forced the agency to be vitally concerned with America’s urban centers. Second, by comparing the FHA to the wider housing market, it will show that the agency, spurred by politics, was more likely than the private sector to support multifamily housing, urban housing, and, after significant civil rights efforts, housing to nonwhites. This paper shows that far from creating the contemporary suburban landscape, the FHA struggled vigorously against its rise.

While researchers have pointed to numerous methods of
expanding state capacity in the Progressive Era, the literature
has overlooked the creation of nominally private companies
relying on implicit government guarantees, later known as government-
sponsored enterprises. This article explains the
novelty and structure of the nation’s first such enterprises,
the Federal Land Banks, and describes how their design
embodied several fragilities that contributed to their collapse
and bailout in 1932. The article then demonstrates why,
despite these problems, the land banks became the model for
subsequent enterprises and financial reforms.

Ecologically-motivated authoritarianism flourished initially during the 1970s but largely disappeared after the decline of socialism in the late-1980s. Today, ‘eco-authoritarianism’ is beginning to reassert itself, this time modeled not after the Soviet Union but modern-day China. The new eco-authoritarians denounce central planning but still suggest that governments should be granted powers that free them from subordination to citizens’ rights or democratic procedures. I argue that current eco-authoritarian views do not present us with an attractive alternative to market liberal democracy even if we take a highly pessimistic view of our shared prospects under the latter sort of regime.

Global climate change is one of the most widely discussed problems of our time. However, many libertarian thinkers have not participated in the ethical dimensions of this discussion due to a narrow focus on the scientific basis for concern about climate change. In this paper, I reject this approach and explore the kind of response libertarians should be offering instead. I frame the climate change problem as one which concerns potential rights-infringements and explore different ways in which climate change might be thought to infringe upon rights. I conclude that there are some ways in which climate change might be expected to result in rights-infringements, but that some of the current concern about climate change cannot be reconciled with a rights-oriented paradigm. Finally, I briefly outline some future directions for research, emphasizing that much remains to be done in order to formulate a complete libertarian perspective on climate change.

Paul Taylor has argued that all living organisms have equal inherent worth. David Schmidtz objects, insisting that there is little to be gained by talk of “equality” in interspecific contexts. On Schmidtz’s view, ethicists should be satisfied simply to say that all organisms deserve respect, while leaving unspecified how such claims to respect measure up to one another. Yet in this paper, I contend that Schmidtz’s position cannot be sustained in the face of predictable and ongoing conflict between species. When sacrifices of some organisms’ interests and lives are inevitable, it is facile to demand simply that all living things deserve respect. Ethicists must be able to say how such conflicts are to be resolved, which means that they must have something to say about how organisms and their interests compare to one another in their moral significance. Paul Taylor may be wrong to think that such questions should be answered by appeal to the moral equality of all living things, but his mistake lies in thinking that all beings’ natures as “teleological centers of life” captures all that is relevant from a moral point of view.

Personal carbon footprints have become a subject of major concern among those who worry about global climate change. Conventional wisdom holds that individuals have a duty to reduce their impacts on the climate system by restricting their carbon footprints. However, I defend a new argument for thinking that this conventional wisdom is mistaken. Individuals, I argue, have a duty to take actions to combat the world’s problems. But since climate change is only one of a nearly endless list of such problems, individuals’ obligations to take action as activists do not specifically require reductions in personal carbon footprints. Moreover, this is true even in spite of the fact that we are personally implicated in causing climate change. This paper also argues that many of those who decide to combat climate change by reducing their carbon footprints are likely doing more than they can justify in this regard. Although most people are not doing enough to combat world problems, a proper devotion to activism would seek a balance with other life demands that many climate activists currently eschew.

“Free-market” environmentalists argue that attempts to promote environmentalist objectives through political channels should be abandoned, for they instantiate inappropriate forms of rent-seeking or moral oppression. On these perspectives, environmentalists should instead promote their distinctive goals through private market activities. In this paper, I show that free-market environmentalists’ arguments for this provocative position either fail to grapple with the moralized nature of many environmentalists’ views, or do so implausibly by ruling out as inherently illegitimate existing policies that seem uncontroversially acceptable.

Kevin Elliott observes that environmental protection efforts often benefit humans, not just because the natural environment is useful, but also because activities that result in environmental protections can also promote a range of other human values. Elliott argues that environmentalists could gain practical advantages by emphasizing these indirect benefits. He also insists that even for environmentalists who believe that nature ought to be protected for its own sake, deploying such arguments would not necessarily pose problems of integrity since more explicitly non-anthropocentric arguments could be employed to complement the ones he favors. In this paper I push back on Elliott’s proposal, arguing that the practical benefits he promises are unlikely to materialize if environmentalists do not reign in their moralistic non-anthropocentrism in public discourse. In practice, environmentalists who understand the demands of integrity in the way Elliott describes will see in his proposal a thorny dilemma, forcing them to choose between their practical efficacy and their integrity as environmentalists.

In recent years, food activists have condemned industrialized agricultural systems for contributing to pollution, environmental degradation, biodiversity loss, economic insecurity, and political inequality. On the basis of such concerns, they have advocated abandoning these systems in favor of more agrarian alternatives. Meanwhile, defenders of industrialized agriculture have argued that their favored techniques are needed to address major challenges to global food security. In their eyes, abandoning industrialized food systems would be catastrophic. Given the depths of these disagreements, one might question how any agricultural policy regime could hope to achieve legitimacy in the eyes of all citizens. This chapter explores the theories of Thomas Hobbes, John Rawls, and Gerald Gaus in order to show how these controversial issues can be resolved without abandoning a commitment to public justification.

Defenders of “free-market" environmentalism have often appealed to the writings of F.A. Hayek to support their favored approaches to environmental political economy. Yet Hayek’s power to vindicate such perspectives is controversial. In fact, some writers have found in Hayek’s writings an invitation to extensive political interventions in the environmental arena. In this paper, I develop three environmentally relevant themes in Hayek’s writings in order to clarify his true legacy for environmental political economy. I argue that Hayek’s most important contributions to environmental debates can be found in his guidance for making public policies compatible with the functionality of the market order.

Liberal political theory seeks to enable diverse groups to coexist respectfully despite their differences. According to liberals, this requires embracing certain political institutions and refraining from imposing controversial views on others. The liberal formula has enjoyed considerable success. However, green political theorists insist liberal societies will precipitate an ecological crisis unless they are transformed in line with (controversial) green views. These perspectives highlight a longstanding gap in liberal theory. Liberalism rose to prominence only after Reformation-era Christians accepted that societal success did not require the ascendancy of any particular doctrine. Liberals never had to show how their recommendations could be reconciled with the once-common view that toleration would be catastrophic. Yet today’s greens once again anticipate catastrophe unless they can remake civilization around their doctrines. Liberals must find a way to respond to these concerns if they are to sustain their paradigm amidst environmental conflicts.