Goal Of Fairness Research Articles

Uncertain science and a failure of trust. The NIH radioepidemiologic tables and compensation for radiation-induced cancer.

In the late 1970s, the U.S. Congress was debating a number of different proposals to provide monetary compensation to residents of Utah and Nevada who had been exposed to radioactive fallout from government nuclear weapons testing in the 1950s. Yet scientists and government officials expressed concern that such a program would end up compensating many people for cancers that were not caused by the fallout. Thus, after much debate, Congress directed the National Institutes of Health to produce a set of statistical tables--the radioepidemiologic tables--to target compensation awards to "deserving" individuals. Advocates of the tables, notably Senator Orrin Hatch, argued that reliance on scientific data would provide compensation decisions with predictability and evenhandedness. Yet in the end, the effort to employ the tables failed. The substantial scientific uncertainties in the tables and in their application to individual claims failed to deliver the authority they promised. Additionally, the goal of fairness and objectivity could not be convincingly met because of persistent controversy and mistrust surrounding the government's role in the study of health effects of low-level radiation.

Lessons from Enron

Some of you know that I have been the Arthur Andersen & Co. Alumni Professor of Accounting at Lehigh University since 1982. A few will know that my relationship with Andersen goes back to 1963, when, as an undergraduate, I was recruited by Fred Zimmer for a summer internship in Andersen's Chicago office. The legendary Leonard Spacek was just finishing up as Andersen's managing partner. Thus, the string of embarrassments afflicting Andersen--Waste Management, Sunbeam, Boston Chicken, Global Crossings, the Baptist Foundation of Arizona, and Enron--hits me particularly hard. A Watershed Event I am not alone in finding the Enron tragedy to be highly instructive, the kind of watershed event that comes along once in a generation or so, the jaws of the kind of disaster from which victory--the good name of the accounting profession--might be snatched. Below I outline some of the lessons to be learned but do not claim to have originated them. Most observers are well aware of the pressures exerted upon the accountancy profession in its role as the public watchdog investors trusted and the countervailing power to corporate financial-reporting interests. Enron is only the latest, most vivid example of the confluence and intensity of those pressures. Accounting Does Not Cause Companies to Implode, But... Public accountants do not make their clients' management decisions. Instead, they advise on accounting matters and are to object when management's financial reports fail to provide the transparency necessary to alert the capital markets to the entrails of the corporation's activities. We understand that the information management wants to report regarding their performance can differ from the information investors need to make investment decisions. We also understand how the notion of countervailing power advanced by John Kenneth Galbraith can relate to business and labor, and to CFOs and CPAs. (1) But suppose that management misunderstands the accounting, or that management misinterprets the auditors' explanation of detailed accounting rules to the point that black appears to be white. Can the accounting, which should portray the economic reality resulting from decisions, actually mask that same reality, and persuade insiders that there is no danger? When expert outside accountants and attorneys bless the financial depiction of internal events, many can be misled. Thus the public accountants' responsibility for ensuring that no one is fooled encompasses both the external capital markets and the internal decision makers. Although preparers must ultimately bear responsibility for issuing misleading information, expert accounting and legal advisers can inadvertently help preparers deceive themselves, as well as those who rely on the preparers' disclosures. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, If You Know What I Mean (laughter) Many will recognize this quotation that makes fun of the loopholes or flexibility in GAAP that can be invoked as support for a variety of financial results. Aware of how this flexibility might exacerbate the tension between managements' and investors' demands for financial information, standard setters saw the need for detailed rules, seeking to keep the corral gates closed. Preparers responsible for applying GAAP, and auditors who review their applications, gradually became dedicated to the proposition that their roles are to comply with the detailed criteria in accounting standards. Some financial-reporting decisions seem driven by the urge to tick off the boxes in checklists; participants in the process apparently forgot the goals of fairness, accuracy, and transparency. In retrospect at least, the 3 percent rule and other criteria for certifying the independence of Special Purpose Entities (SPEs) seem ludicrous. Adhering to this rule may satisfy preparers and auditors that their decision not to consolidate the SPE will hold up under SEC scrutiny. …

Joined-Up Solutions to Address Health Inequalities: Analysing Policy, Process and Resource Streams

New Labour argues that its ‘new NHS’ will achieve the traditional goal of fairness using the modern NHS means of partnership and co-operation. The authors examine the issue of reducing inequalities in health using the framework of policy, process and resource streams. While the policy stream is a little muddy, the process and resource streams are more opaque. In particular, there are concerns about technical and political feasibility, and little apparent attention to issues of opportunity costs and trade-offs. The low priority given to health inequalities is reflected in the resource stream, where there are also issues of accountability and budgetary slack. The authors argue that the limited confluence of the streams is unlikely to lead to a sea-change in the level of health inequalities.

Evaluating Participative Capacity-building in Environmental Policy: Provincial Fish Protection and Parks Management in British Columbia, Canada

For provincial fish protection and parks policy in British Columbia, the provincial government has recently experimented with the devolution of environmental management design through a range of participatory instruments. This paper examines this 'participative capacity-building' according to key criteria adopted by the provincial environmental bureaucracy. The corporate rationale for the use of participatory policy instruments is outlined, uncovering the shared causal assumptions of public agency officials about the linkages of these tools to general goals of procedural fairness and ecological competence. While the formative stage of the two environmental decision areas precludes any evaluation related to substantive policy outcomes, comparative findings on the appropriateness of the capacity-building are offered on the basis of internal staff appraisals and the views of key stakeholders. For parks management, the 1997-99 Park Legacy consultation process successfully adopted a variety of community-based participatory tools to discover shared values and interests on management issues. The process is widely acknowledged as having been inclusive, and its policy recommendations have reaffirmed the ecological role of provincial parks as well as endorsing the institutionalization of stakeholder participation in parks management. In the case of provincial fish protection, bureaucratic and political power-trading led to fragmented and skewed participative capacity-building. Negotiations on the critical regulatory area of streamside protection exposed key jurisdictional tensions between the federal, provincial and municipal governments.

Implementation and Evaluation of Church-Based Health Fairs

From a comprehensive, community health-needs assessment based on the Neuman Systems Model (Neuman, 1995), cardiovascular disease was identified as the priority health concern in one quadrant of a small Midwestern city. The Plan, Do, Check, Act program planning model (Dees&Garcia, 1995) was the basis for the planning, implementation, and evaluation of a mini cardiovascular health fair held at 3 churches. Congruence of the program planning model with the roles of the clinical specialist in community health nursing is discussed, followed by a discussion of the health fair goals and objectives, implementation, and formative and summative evaluations.

The Role of Administrative Factors in Tax Reform: Simplicity, Compliance and Enforcement

This paper examines the role of administrative factors in tax reform. How difficult is it for taxpayers to comply with and understand the current tax system? How much does operating the system cost? How well are taxes enforced? How would modifying the income tax or starting over with a new system affect the answers? The answers to these questions, and the trade-offs and interactions between simplicity and other policy goals are crucial elements of tax policy choices. We show that there are significant disagreements concerning the operating costs and complexity of the current income tax system and that outdated, incomplete, and poorly conceived data on compliance costs contribute to the range of estimates. Based on the available data, we find that the current system imposes compliance and administrative costs of between $75 billion and $130 billion per year on individuals, businesses, and the federal government. We discuss several ways to improve the administration of the existing tax system and reduce compliance costs. We also show that pure versions of the national retail sales tax and the flat tax could dramatically reduce filing burdens for millions of taxpayers. However, realistic, politically plausible versions of both the sales tax and the flat tax would require tax rates much higher than those advertised by their proponents. These higher rates complicate tax compliance and enforcement. The sales tax would face potentially serious problems with enforceability and political pressure for exemptions. The flat tax would face the same political pressures, and while enforceability is not a major concern, the tax would likely become significantly more complex than currently proposed. Thus, there is considerable potential to simplify the tax system. Policy makers and voters should analyze this potential in the context of the trade-offs it creates with other goals of tax policy-including efficiency, fairness, revenue, and privacy.

Editors' Introduction Ethics in Contemporary Human Resources Management

Administrative Ethics: In Theory Ethical considerations are both at the core and on the surface of contemporary human resources management. Important decisions almost always require a human resources manager to contemplate his or her ethical orientation. Personnel decisions are undoubtedly affected by a public manager's ethical orientation. Distinctions between teleological and deontological ethics might be dismissed as useless academic differentiation. But, it matters a great deal whether a human resources manager bases actions on teleological reasoning, in which the ends justify the means, as opposed to deontological reasoning, in which decisions are based upon principle. The public setting of government seems to mandate the latter orientation. The Pendleton Act of 1883, the birth of the modern personnel system, was based upon the principles of merit, appointment, and promotion. As a result of implementation of the federal civil service system and similar state and local level systems, patronage personnel policies were slowly rooted out and this contributed to the decline of political machines. The social movements of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, challenged the traditional administrative values of efficiency and economy. The so-called New Public Administration argued for the recognition of a social conscience in public administration, and the institution of the principle of equity. Reforms in American public administration are replete with references to principles such as competence, efficiency, fairness, equality, equity, and democracy. Some principles of public administration are in conflict. For example, to make selection and hiring decisions based on merit principles could possibly interfere with the goals of equity and fairness. Ralph Clark Chandler explores such considerations in Deontological Dimensions of Administrative Ethics, Revisited. Chandler applies theoretical ethical orientations to actual examples of dilemmas faced by public administrators. In The Morally Mute Manager: Fact or Fiction?, Donald. C. Menzel suggests that New Public Management produces an environment that encourages public managers to be silent on matters of ethics. Menzel discusses the consequences of such circumstances, and their implications for administrators. Contemporary Ethical Issues in Human Resources Administration Political events and technological advancements have altered the context of personnel management. Watergate, the Iran-Contra scandal, the savings and loan scandal, the HUD scandal, the Ill-Winds procurement scandal, and additional political transgressions have contributed to a general decline in trust in government institutions. While these scandals were primarily the work of elected or politically appointed actors, administrative agencies have unfortunately been deeply affected. Bureaucrat bashing is now a standard part of political campaigns. Human resources administrators must now maneuver through an unfriendly political environment. In addition to the changing nature of American politics, technology has altered the tasks of the human resources manager. Advancements in telecommunications, computing technology, and management techniques have combined to make the job of the human resources manager both simpler and more complex. Besides technological changes and the implications of political events, the nature of personnel administration has been altered by legal and statutory measures instituted to ensure the rights and liberties of public employees. The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the student movement of the 1970s, and the women's movement of the 1970s culminating in the Equal Rights Amendment, all contributed to the increasingly complex web of protective statutory law. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, the Vocational Rehabilitation act of 1972, and the Age Discrimination Act of 1974 are only a few examples of the congressional measures enacted to prohibit various types of discrimination in employment. …

Ethics, justice and women's health

The ethical obligations that physicians owe their patients have a long history of study, and have inspired the modern discipline called bioethics. Physician-patient relations tell only one half of the story of ethics, however. The other half concerns public health and the allocation of scarce resources to a population’s health needs. The former ethics are often described as ‘microethics’, and the latter as ‘macroethics’. Laws, such as on patients’ consent to treatment and rights to confidentiality serve microethical goals, and are part of what is often called private law. Laws supporting macroethics are part of domestic constitutional law and international human rights law. This body of law is currently grappling with the problem of defining the right to the highest attainable standard of health, expressed in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural w x Rights 1 . Ethical approaches to resource allocation raise the problem of whether scarce resources are better concentrated on achieving effective results, such as by prioritizing treatment of patients with the greatest prospects of rehabilitation to good health rather than patients closest to death, or on serving the goal of social fairness or equity. This

A Pricing Rule for Affiliate Transactions: Room for Consensus

Because it conforms to politically acceptable notions of “fairness,” state and federal regulators have relied heavily on the concept of fully distributed cost to govern affiliate transactions. This should be leavened by alternative transfer-pricing measures to balance the goals of economic efficiency and fairness.

Group Harmony and Interpersonal Fairness in Reward Allocation: On the Loci of the Moderation Effect

Goals of group harmony and interpersonal fairness in reward allocation are believed to invoke use of the equality and equity rules, respectively. The present research tested the hypotheses that the allocation rule is subtraction, and that the moderation effect of the goal of group harmony arises from response distortions on the reward scale, cognitive distortions of the inputs given, or both. Participants from India divided monetary reward between two persons “fairly” and in a way that can “minimize group conflict.” There were two inputs about each person—effort and performance (Experiment I) or performance over 2 years (Experiments II–IV). Data of majority of the participants conformed to the requirements of the subtractive model. Patterns in the moderation effect across the raw and monotonically rescaled data of individual participants further indicated that the response distortions, input distortions, and response-input distortions are the most, moderate, and least frequent responses to the goal of group harmony, respectively. These findings not only confirm the subtractive model but also offer a new view on the loci of the moderation effect in reward allocation.

It's Broke So Let's Fix It: Using a Quasi-inquisitorial Approach to Limit the Impact of Bias in the American Criminal Justice System

This article examines the Italian Code of Criminal Procedure (Codice di procedura penale) as a theoretical model for transformation of the U.S. accusatorial system of justice. Specifically, the article systematically analyzes how the goals of impartiality and fairness might be more aptly promoted through the adoption of a quasi-inquisitorial system of justice in the U.S.

The “Punishment Lottery”: An Immodest Proposal for Maximizing Deterrence, Doing Justice, and Reducing Prison Overcrowding, All at Once

This paper offers a new proposal for the sentencing of most convicted felons that promises simultaneously to promote general deterrence and to reduce prison overcrowding in a fair manner. Called the “punishment lottery,” I recommend subjecting convictees to a random system that imposes prison sentences that are usually shorter, but sometimes longer, than current sentences. Specific guidelines are suggested for enacting my proposal. I then offer empirical evidence and argumentation to support my claims that the punishment lottery can deter potential offenders, accomplish the retributive goal of fairness, and substantially reduce prison overcrowding, all at once.

Environmental regionalism and the struggle for California

Regionalism has recently become an attractive rubric for advocates of environmental policy reforms. In California, two main versions of “environmental regionalism” are administrative regionalism and bioregionalism. Administrative regionalism seeks to increase policy implementation and effectiveness by extending agency control over land use and resource and pollution management to a regional level. Bioregionalism encourages local control over resources and environmental policy, while seeking to transform citizens through value change and political participation. Although proponents promise far more rational environmental outcomes if their reforms are implemented, neither administrative regionalism nor bioregionalism will be able to address the often conflicting goals of fairness, political democracy, and decisive, effective transboundary environmental management. Thus, until these goals are reconciled, environmental regionalism is unlikely to break political gridlock over environmental policy in California...

The calculation and application of composite telecommunications service price indexes

An accurate understanding of telecommunications price behavior is critical to nearly all regulatory and economic analyses of telecommunications policy. Regulators need telecommunications price indexes to assess the relative affordability, utility, and availability of telecommunications services in order to promote economic development, fairness, and other social goals. Economists use price indexes to measure industry-specific and economy-wide production, consumption, technological change, growth, productivity, and competitiveness. To date, however, no complete investigation of national-level aggregate telecommunications prices has been undertaken, nor has any state-specific telecommunications price index been created. This is in spite of burgeoning interest in alternative regulatory mechanisms and the high stakes of regulatory action. As part of a recent comprehensive investigation of the economic implications of telecommunications infrastructure modernization, conducted for the Pennsylvania Public Utilities Commission, the authors have compiled state-level, service-specific telecommunications price indexes and have created national-level composites in order to compare Pennsylvania and U.S. price trends. We find significant differences between national average and Pennsylvania telecommunications price indexes, which describe important variations in the ways telecommunications services have affected state-wide economic development.

The constitutional logic of affirmative action

Few issues are as mired in rhetoric and controversy as affirmative action. This is certainly no less true now as when Ronald J. Fiscus's The Constitutional Logic of Affirmative Action was first published in 1992. The controversy has, perhaps, become more charged over the past few years. With this compelling and rigorously reasoned argument for a constitutional rationale of affirmative action, Fiscus clarifies the moral and legal ramifications of this complex subject and presents an important view in the context of the ongoing debate. Beginning with a distinction drawn between principles of compensatory and distributive justice, Fiscus argues that the former, although often the basis for judgments made in individual cases, cannot sufficiently justify broad programs of affirmative action. Only a theory of distributive justice, one that assumes minorities have a right to what they would have gained proportionally in a nonracist society, can persuasively provide that justification. On this basis, the author argues in favor of proportional racial quotas-and challenges the charge of reverse discrimination raised in protest in the name of the innocent victims of affirmative action-as an action necessary to approach the goals of fairness and equality. The Constitutional Logic of Affirmative Action focuses on Supreme Court affirmative action rulings from Bakke (1976) to Croson (1989) and includes an epilogue by editor Stephen L. Wasby that considers developments through 1995. General readers concerned with racial justice, affirmative action, and public policy, as well as legal specialists and constitutional scholars will find Fiscus's argument passionate, balanced, and persuasive.

Criteria for redistricting the goal of political fairness

National Civic ReviewVolume 71, Issue 4 p. 195-202 Article Criteria for redistricting the goal of political fairness Harry Basehart, Harry Basehart Harry Basehart is associate professor of political science, Salisbury State College, Salisbury, Maryland.Search for more papers by this author Harry Basehart, Harry Basehart Harry Basehart is associate professor of political science, Salisbury State College, Salisbury, Maryland.Search for more papers by this author First published: April 1982 https://doi.org/10.1002/ncr.4100710406 AboutPDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume71, Issue4April 1982Pages 195-202 RelatedInformation