Pieces Of Conventional Wisdom Research Articles

A History of Family Planning in Twentieth-Century Peru by Raúl Necochea López

A History of Family Planning in Twentieth-Century Peru, by Raul Necochea Lopez. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2014. 256 pp. $32.95 US (paper). In this well-researched and smartly-organized book, Raul Necochea Lopez expands and complicates the historical narrative about reproduction, contraception, fertility, society, and the state in modern Peru. Necochea is particularly interested in exploring the shifting constellation of actors and organizations that promoted, suppressed, and interacted with family planning during a long period marked by urbanization, civil war, political upheaval, and advances in reproductive medicine and technologies. Moving chronologically, the book's seven substantive chapters follow the variegated development of family planning from the beginnings of academic medicine in the nineteenth century to the formulation of population policies after World War II. Although Necochea does not offer an in-depth assessment of the extensive sterilization campaign carried out in the 1990s, which involved tens of thousands of tubal ligations performed on Indigenous women, he does provide a compelling historical context for understanding how such a social program could have emerged in Peru under the neoliberal regime of Alberto Fujimori (president, 1990-2000). This book explodes several pieces of conventional wisdom that frequently undergird studies of reproduction and fertility in Latin America. First, Necochea demonstrates that abortion, while illegal, was not heavily criminalized for the first two-thirds of the twentieth century in Peru. For many decades, with high rates of maternal and infant mortality, other common forms of pregnancy loss easily could overshadow abortion. At the same time, many leading physicians sympathized with the economic and social conditions that prompted women to seek therapeutic abortions. Indeed, by examining criminal cases from Lima involving abortion or suspicious miscarriages between the early 1960s and late 1970s, Necochea reveals that a drastic rise of police investigations of such cases did not start until around 1973. This chapter is doubly impressive, because of Necochea's multi-layered archival research (medical records, legal documents, and a range of primary sources) and his careful discussion about the need to analyze abortion in Peru in its unique social, political, and medical milieu. This caveat is particularly important for Anglophone and American readers accustomed to thinking about abortion as a stand-alone contested and stigmatized practice throughout the twentieth century. Second, one of Necochea's most fascinating chapters explores the seemingly unexpected programs run by the Catholic Church, which offered birth control pills alongside health exams, sexual education, and parenting classes. Rather than reject birth control as unnatural, after WWII some Catholic leaders in Peru promoted the use of oral contraceptives, viewing them as compatible with the responsible regulation of fertility. …

Fibonacci – Protagonist or Witness? Who Taught Catholic Christian Europe about Mediterranean Commercial Arithmetic?

AbstractLeonardo Fibonacci (ca. 1170 - after 1240) during his boyhood went to Bejaïa, learned about the Hindu-Arabic numerals there, and continued to collect information about their use during travels to the Arabic world. He then wrote the Liber abbaci, which with half a century’s delay inspired the creation of Italian abbacus mathematics, later adopted in Catalonia, Provence, Germany etc. Hindu- Arabic numerals, and Arabic mathematics, was thus transmitted through a narrow and unique gate. This piece of conventional wisdom is well known - too well known to be true, indeed. There is no doubt, of course, that Fibonacci learned about Arabic (and Byzantine) commercial arithmetic, and that he presented it in his book. He is thus a witness (with a degree of reliability which has to be determined) of the commercial mathematics thriving in the commercially developed parts of the Mediterranean world. However, much evidence - presented both in his own book, in later Italian abbacus books and in similar writings from the Iberian and the Provençal regions - shows that the Liber abbaci did not play a central role in the later adoption. Romance abbacus culture came about in a broad process of interaction with Arabic non-scholarly traditions, at least until ca. 1350 within an open space, apparently concentrated around the Iberian region.

The relativity of decline: a reappraisal of French leadership and influence in a time of global crisis

This article is an attempt, in the context of the Eurozone crisis that has shaken Europe since 2008, to explore and deconstruct two pieces of conventional wisdom on French leadership in Europe and the world. The stereotypical image of a country in decline and denial, out of touch with today’s globalised world, is reproduced so often in the Anglo-American media and even in scholarly discourse, that is has become a self-evident truism. The article examines this truism in two different perspectives: there is, on the one hand, the axiom that France has lost influence in Europe and that the balance of power has shifted inexorably to Germany and, on the other hand, the axiom that Europe does not matter in the global ‘power shift’ and that, as part of Europe, France does not count any more either. In questioning the origins and validity of these axioms, the authors argue that a strong perception bias persists and is constantly perpetuated even though reality has changed. Not only has France rather successfully adapted to globalisation in both political and economic terms, but it has also found new ways and discourses about its role as Germany’s partner in leadership in the European Union. The paper goes on to show that both France and the EU retain and use significant levers for action in three dimensions of power—coercion, agenda-setting and attraction. It concludes that going into 2012, France remains an active and important actor, both in the EU and on the global scene. It is present and influential in major international institutions, effectively builds international coalitions and floats important ideas on reforming laissez-faire capitalism.

Econometric tests of American college football's conventional wisdom

College football fans, coaches and observers have adopted a set of beliefs about how college football poll voters behave. I document three pieces of conventional wisdom in college football regarding the timing of wins and losses, the value of playing strong opponents and the value of winning by wide margins. Using a unique data set with 25 years of Associated Press (AP) poll results, I use a hedonic regression to test college football's conventional wisdom. In particular, I test (1) whether it is better to lose early or late in the season, (2) whether teams benefit from playing stronger opponents and (3) whether teams are rewarded for winning by large margins. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I find that (1) it is better to lose later in the season than earlier, (2) AP voters do not pay attention to the strength of a defeated opponent and (3) the benefit of winning by a large margin is negligible. I conclude by noting how these results inform debates about a potential playoff in college football.

The Role of Prices in Measuring the Poor's Living Standards

In this paper, we revisit two pieces of conventional wisdom in the current debate about poverty, paying close attention to the price data underlying these findings: that the poor pay more than households of higher income for the goods and services they purchase; and that poverty rates, at least as measured by the U.S. Census, have remained essentially flat since the late 1960s, raising questions about the success of the policies implemented to reduce poverty. By examining scanner data on thousands of household purchases, we find that the poor pay less—not more—for the goods they purchase. And by extending the advances on price measurement in the recent decade back to the 1970s, we find that current poverty rates are less than half of the official numbers.

Determinants of futures-oriented environmental policies: A multi-country analysis

This research explores the validity of several hypotheses concerning the future-orientedness of countries. Nine hypotheses that relate futures-orientedness to characteristics of countries are presented. Several of these hypotheses represent ‘conventional wisdom’ about the differences between developed and developing countries and their respective values and political systems. As an example, it can be argued that conventional wisdom holds that more democratic countries will be more futures-oriented. The number of international environmental agreements signed by a country and the number of provisions related to AGENDA21 being implemented by a country were used as proxies for measures of futures-orientedness. Almost 30 independent variables drawn from a variety of secondary sources were used in two multiple regression models to investigate the hypotheses. The results do not support several pieces of conventional wisdom. Specifically, the results suggest that there is: a negative relationship between democracy and futures-orientedness; no relationship between the level of development and futures-orientedness; and a negative relationship exists between wealth and life expectancy and futures-orientedness. These results call into question a view that more democratic, developed, and rich countries are more concerned about the future than their ‘less developed’ counterparts. The results did indicate that countries with more environmental problems tend to be more futures-oriented as are countries that may be experiencing population pressures. Countries with more land tend to be less futures-oriented. More work is needed to better understand the relationships between culture and governmental decision-making structures on futures-orientedness. Future research should also focus on constructing better measures of futures-orientedness.

Is the Fault in Our Steroids or in Our Selves?

Is the Fault in Our Steroids or in Our Selves?

What Caused the Civil War?: Reflections on the South and Southern History (review)

Reviewed by: What Caused the Civil War? Reflections on the South and Southern History George C. Rable What Caused the Civil War? Reflections on the South and Southern History. By Edward L. Ayers. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005. Pp. 222. $24.95.) Edward Ayers's work has been most attuned to the cacophonies of history, and his latest book is no exception. The prose is always clear, but bringing order to the complexities and contradictions of southern history is not part of Ayers's project. He has clearly taken Jacob Burckhardt's classic warning about "terrible simplifiers" to heart. This collection of essays—that includes generous doses of autobiography—reveals how Ayers came to appreciate his native region's history and then to challenge various pieces of conventional wisdom. Ayers's reflections on writing a history of the New South and on the legacy of C. Vann Woodward are provocative, but readers of this journal will likely be more interested in what has become Ayers's increasing engagement with the Civil War era. In many ways, the creation of the Valley of the Shadow website came as a logical culmination of Ayers's passion for taking into account history's often disparate and discordant voices. Ayers's classic work The Promise of the New South often let readers draw their own conclusions about what both the title and the period meant, but the "Valley of the Shadow" website went an additional step, encouraging people to muck about in an enormous volume of primary materials and essentially become, ala Carl Becker, their own historians. Ayers clearly became enthralled by the technology of the project, and even for readers who lack any technical bent, his essay "A Digital Civil War" nicely conveys the challenges of wrestling with the limits of HTML and other mysterious matters. Cyberspace democratizes scholarship and puts a wide array of primary sources literally at our fingertips, but historians of the Civil War era continue to wrestle with old questions while the public appetite for old and new myths appears to be growing. Ayers enters scholarly and public debate on the Civil War era but decidedly on his own terms. Not surprisingly he agrees with Abraham Lincoln that somehow the slavery question was at heart of the sectional conflict but refuses to join what [End Page 170] he calls "fundamentalist" historians who would emphasize slavery to the exclusion of almost any other issue. Indeed Ayers finds merit in the interpretations of more recent revisionists such as Michael Holt who have argued that party structure and political miscalculation greatly contributed to the secession crisis and resulting war. This reasonable and capacious approach to historiography leaves room for everything from contingency, to communications, to modernity in analyzing the antebellum era. As for the war, Ayers boldly calls for a new kind of revisionism that would raise questions about a progressive narrative that is especially prominent in the work of James McPherson and Ken Burns. Ayers seeks to rehabilitate (but of course never entirely embrace) Edmund Wilson and Robert Penn Warren's skepticism and even refurbish the economic and blundering generation interpretations. He is especially wary of any analysis that would place too much faith in the power of war to solve political problems. Whether a historian could actually construct an explanatory and interpretative narrative about the coming of the Civil War from such incongruent and contradictory approaches remains the unanswered question, but let's hope that Ayers or some historian of comparable talent makes the attempt. Not content with raising some sharp questions about Civil War causation and the war itself, Ayers plunges ahead into the tangled thicket of Reconstruction. He boldly suggests that the Reconstruction period can shed light on other efforts by Americans to transform the world by spreading democracy. His provocative essay "Exporting Reconstruction" is a model of comparative history that refuses to draw the kind of superficial analogies that often crop up in highly polarized political debate. Indeed, it is interesting that in the discussions of the Iraq war, Americans have generally not turned to the Civil War and Reconstruction in search of enlightenment—perhaps because the era offers neither simple answers to our agonizing questions...

The Pathological Politics of Criminal Law

It has long been the conventional wisdom that American criminal is too broad and too harsh, that it criminalizes too much and punishes too severely. It has also long been the conventional wisdom that these problems flow directly out of electoral politics. This article argues that, while the first piece of conventional wisdom is right, the second is wrong. Criminal law's breadth and severity flow not from electoral politics but from institutional politics, from the interacting incentives of prosecutors, legislators, and judges. Prosecutorial discretion gives legislators a strong incentive to broaden liability rules, which in turn give prosecutors more discretion. Courts are thereby cut out of the lawmaking process. The result is that criminal law, as it expands, does less and less work - the real boundaries of criminal liability are defined by enforcers, not by the law. And ironically, the doctrines that aim to ensure the rule of law reinforce that result. The article goes on to explore, sketchily, some solutions to this problem of institutional design. The most promising solutions involve a substantial increase in judicial power over criminal - more precisely, a substantial degree of constitutionalization of criminal law. As that hardly seems likely anytime in the foreseeable future, the problems that afflict American criminal are likely to get worse before they get better.

Exercising choice for national healthcare. In the end, we'll get what we choose.

Whether we evolve toward a market model, a play-or-pay model, or a national model will depend largely upon our personal beliefs and perspectives. Unfortunately, in the hectic and fast-paced life that virtually all of us lead, we base many of our conclusions on unexamined bits and pieces of conventional wisdom. We have looked at but five of them. Yet these bits and pieces become the yardsticks by which we measure other plans and other people. Instead of listening to and studying the approaches proposed by others, we are often too quick to dismiss them with labels such as "too costly," or "too capitalist," or "too socialist," or "too whatever." As a consequence, we become prisoners of our own ideology. Would that we were more like Tillich's (1951) description of the famous theologian, Karl Barth, who "...strenuously tries not to become his own follower" (5). In other words, we would work to continually inform and correct ourselves in light of new understanding. Our healthcare problems--any social problems, for that matter--are never really solved. All we can do is do our best at meeting needs, even if it means that in meeting one set of needs we inadvertently create other needs. But that is why we are enriched when we accept the challenge of continuing to question our personal bits and pieces of conventional wisdom. In a recent column in the Houston Post, Richard Reeves cites statistical evidence, known to most who work in the healing professions, indicating that people who live alone tend to suffer from greater illness.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

Trade Liberalization and Competitive Behavior: A Note Assessing the Evidence and the Public Policy Implications

A strongly held piece of conventional wisdom is that liberalizing barriers to international trade stimulates increased competition, which, in tum, promotes lower domestic prices and increased efficiency. Against this background, competition policy authorities seem to be taking a relatively benign view of merger and acquisition activity that is presumed to be linked to trade liberalization. A stream of literature has recently emerged that raises questions about the magnitude and even the direction of the impact of trade liberalization on competition. This literature cautions against easing legislative restrictions on merger activity contingent on trade liberalization initiatives.