Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Knowledge About Welfare: Legal Realism And The Separation Of Law And Economics, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

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The welfare state could not function without judgments about how well off its citizens are. For example, governments devise progressive income taxes, which are designed to capture more wealth from the well off and less from the impecunious. These policies presume an ability to take a manageable amount of information about an individual's income or assets and make judgments about her welfare. In fact, people do this all the time, mostly without thinking about the methodological problems involved.

The superficial casualness of our daily observations about welfare belies the state of the economic science of welfare measurement. Economists have attempted …

A Comprehensive Wealth Tax, David Shakow, Reed Shuldiner

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Income, consumption, and wealth are all possible bases for a tax system in the United States. Scholars have specified the structure of income tax and consumption taxes, but no one has attempted to describe in detail a comprehensive wealth tax for the United States. In this paper, we begin to develop such a structure. In particular, we hypothesize that the combination of a flat rate tax on networth and a flat rate tax on earned income along with an appropriate level of exemptions, could be an attractive tax base. In order to explore the structure of a wealth tax, we …

The Paradox Of Silence: Some Questions About Silence As Resistance, Dorothy E. Roberts

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No abstract provided.

Vern Countryman And The Path Of Progressive (And Populist) Bankruptcy Scholarship, David A. Skeel Jr.

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Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Vern Countryman was the leading progressive bankruptcy scholar - and in fact the leading bankruptcy scholar of any perspective. This article explores the links between Countryman's work and that of his New Deal predecessors, on the one hand, and his successors, on the other. In addition to Countryman himself, the article focuses on William Douglas, who was Countryman's predecessor and mentor, as well as being the leading bankruptcy scholar of the New Deal. Among Countryman's successors, the article focuses on the work of Elizabeth Warren, Countryman's successor at Harvard Law School and the nation's leading …

The Complicated Ingredients Of Wisdom And Leadership, Michael A. Fitts

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No abstract provided.