Political Economy Commons^™

Equal Opportunity, Individual Liberty And Meritocracy In Education: Reinforcing Structures Of Privilege And Inequality, Christian Sundquist

Articles

The paradigm of equal opportunity inevitably seeks to reproduce and maintain structures of class and racial privilege. The deficit story of equal opportunity is as follows: equal opportunity is a truly objective, neutral, and fair method to allocate educational, employment, and political resources to members of society, without regard to race, class, gender or ethnicity. The ideal of equality assumes the possibility of an objective measure of merit under which individuals' free choices and preferences may be evaluated. Accordingly, through the creation of a baseline that presupposes the inherent sameness of all people and disregards systemic discrimination as a fallacy, …

What's My Copy Right?, Michael J. Madison

Articles

This piece consists of an early 21st century whimsy, a dialogue that borrows and blends history and humor to illustrate some puzzles of copyright law in the context of digital technology (with references to Folsom v. Marsh and Abbott & Costello).

Excerpt From (Same) Sex Tourism, Jasbir Puar

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

The impetus behind this project stems from an incident in February 1998 when several "gay" cruises originating from Europe and the U.S. were refused docking privileges in various parts of the Caribbean, invoking responses from British Prime Minister Tony Blair and U.S. officials, both insisting on the egregious violation of human rights. The on-going dilemma over the docking of gay cruise ships led me to ask questions about the constructions of community created through and against such encounters and the production of a global gay identity that is contested by postcolonial situations. Ironically, the U.S. and British states advocate protection …

Becoming Visible: The Ada's Impact On Healthcare For Persons With Disabilities, Mary Crossley

Articles

This Article will adopt the perspective of individuals with disabilities in their encounters with the health care finance and delivery system in the United States, and will pose the question of what the past decade has shown the ADA to mean (or not mean) for those individuals' ability to seek, receive, and pay for effective health care services. To that end, this Article will provide an overview of three broad areas on which the ADA has had varying degrees of impact.

Part II of the Article will examine how the ADA has affected the rights of an individual with a …

Complexity And Copyright In Contradiction, Michael J. Madison

Articles

The title of the article is a deliberate play on architect Robert Venturi's classic of post-modern architectural theory, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. The article analyzes metaphorical 'architectures' of copyright and cyberspace using architectural and land use theories developed for the physical world. It applies this analysis to copyright law through the lens of the First Amendment. I argue that the 'simplicity' of digital engineering is undermining desirable 'complexity' in legal and physical structures that regulate expressive works.

The Challenge Of Administration By Regulation: Preliminary Findings Regarding The U.S. Government's Venture Capital Funds, Jonathan G.S. Koppell

Publications from President Jonathan G.S. Koppell

This article assesses the ability of elected officials to control public policy as implemented by public/private hybrid organizations, specifically, government venture capital funds. The study reveals greater control over OPIC investment funds than Enterprise Funds despite the existence of more traditional administrative tools of control for Enterprise Funds. This finding suggests that the regulatory infrastructure for hybrid organizations is more determinative of control than the existence (or lack) of traditional administrative control tools. Thus the challenge of hybrid government centers on the development of regulation as a substitute for administration.

Medicaid Managed Care And Disability Discrimination Issues, Mary Crossley

Articles

This article examines issues potentially raised under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) by states' decisions whether and how to include disabled Medicaid recipients in the massive shift towards Medicaid managed care. Part II briefly examines the special issues that disabled Medicaid recipients pose with respect to managed care enrollment. These include issues of cost, quality, access, and program design and implementation. Part III describes various approaches that state programs have taken or are proposing to take with respect to the enrollment of disabled Medicaid recipients in managed care. These approaches range from simply excluding the SSI population from managed …

Development, Change, And Poverty In The Informal Sector During The Era Of Structural Adjustments In Tanzania, Joe Lugalla

Institute for Educational Development, East Africa

This article focuses on periods of economic crisis and structural adjustments in Tanzania, when the informal sector changed both quantitatively and qualitatively. It highlights that the traditional view that the informal sector accommodated the unemployed, the poor, the unskilled, as well as utilizing family labour and local resources, was questionable in most of the sub-Saharan countries which were experiencing a severe economic crisis and have adopted structural adjustment policies (SAPs). The author suggests that policy programs aimed at promoting the informal sector should acknowledge the fact that the crisis, as well as SAPs, have forced not only the poor, but …

Missing Links In The Study Of Puerto Rican Poverty In The United States, James Jennings

William Monroe Trotter Institute Publications

This Occasional Paper, based on a presentation to the National Puerto Rican Coalition in Washington, DC, in 1992, proposes some limitations in "quantitative-only" research focusing on Puerto Rican poverty in the United States. An overreliance on quantitative-based analysis, as well as overlooking historical and comparative data, may not allow for a full understanding and awareness of the nature and maintenance of poverty in Puerto Rican communities in the United States. While the presentation acknowledges the importance of sophisticated quantitative research, it implies that joined together with historical and comparative analysis, investigations of Puerto Rican poverty would be vastly improved. An …

Medical Futility And Disability Discrimination, Mary Crossley

Articles

The concept of medical futility, which originally developed in the medical literature as a basis for allocating between physician and patient decisional authority regarding end-of-life treatment, is increasingly appearing in discussions regarding possible methods of containing medical costs by limiting treatment. This use of medical futility as a rationing mechanism, whether by a state Medicaid program or by a hospital, raises concerns regarding its impact on persons with severe disabilities near the end of life. This article considers how the applicability of the Americans with Disabilities Act to cost-conscious futility policies might be analyzed. After developing arguments that proponents and …

Of Diagnoses And Discrimination: Discriminatory Nontreatment Of Infants With Hiv Infection, Mary Crossley

Articles

Evidence of physician attitudes favoring the withholding of needed medical treatment from infants infected with HIV compels a reassessment of the applicability and adequacy of existing law in dealing with selective nontreatment. Although we can hope to have learned some lessons from the Baby Doe controversy of the mid-1980s, whether the legislation emerging from that controversy, the Child Abuse Amendments of 1984, has ever adequately dealt with the problem of nontreatment remains far from clear. Today, the medical and social characteristics of most infants infected with HIV introduce new variables into our assessment of that legislation. At stake are the …

Job Search Outcomes For The Employed And Unemployed, David M. Blau, Philip K. Robins

Economics Articles and Papers



This paper examines how four components of the job search process--the choice of search methods, the choice of how many firms to contact, the rate at which offers are received, and the acceptance or rejection of an offer--influence the job-finding rate. A reduced-form model of job search is estimated that takes account of the fact that users of a particular method of job search are not a random subset of all searchers. The empirical analysis focuses on differences in search behavior between the employed and unemployed. A key finding of the analysis is that the offer rate per contact …

Residency Law Could Stabilize Local Economic Base, Chester Smolski

Smolski Texts

"Should city employees be required to live in the communities which employ them? This is the question which more and more cities are seriously considering as they seek ways to stem the unabated flow of their residents to the suburbs and to raise needed tax dollars."