Responsibility For Crisis Research Articles

The current crisis and the culpability of macroeconomic theory

The ideas at the heart of modern macroeconomics provided the intellectual justification of the economic policies of the past 10 to 15 years. It is these ideas which the financial crisis falsified. The dominant paradigm in macroeconomic theory over the past 30 years has been that of rational agents making optimal decisions under the assumption that they form their expectations about the future rationally—the rational agent using rational expectations, or RARE for short. The focus of the paper is on the way in which RARE deals with risk and uncertainty. It is this which is at the root of the problems, both for the discipline of economics and, much more importantly, for the economy itself and the financial crisis. Modern RARE macroeconomics bears a heavy burden of responsibility for the financial crisis. The discipline provided the intellectual underpinning for a world in which situations involving risk led to it being systematically underestimated, and in which situations of genuine uncertainty were not recognised for what they were.

The Efficient Markets Hypothesis: The Demise of the Demon of Chance?

Many commentators have suggested that economists in general and financial economists in particular have some responsibility for the recent global financial crisis. They were blinded by an irrational faith in a discredited Efficient Markets Hypothesis and failed to see the bubble in asset prices and to give due warning of its collapse. There is considerable confusion as to what this hypothesis is and what it says. The irony is that the strong implication of this hypothesis is that nobody, no practitioner, no academic and no regulator had the ability to foresee the collapse of this most recent bubble. While few economists believe it is literally true, this hypothesis is considered a useful benchmark with some important practical implications. Indeed, a case can be made that it was the failure to believe in the essential truth of this idea which was a leading factor responsible for the global financial crisis.

Misconceptions about High-Fructose Corn Syrup: Is It Uniquely Responsible for Obesity, Reactive Dicarbonyl Compounds, and Advanced Glycation Endproducts?

Misconceptions about high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) abound in the scientific literature, the advice of health professionals to their patients, media reporting, product advertising, and the irrational behavior of consumers. Foremost among these is the misconception that HFCS has a unique and substantive responsibility for the current obesity crisis. Inaccurate information from ostensibly reliable sources and selective presentation of research data gathered under extreme experimental conditions, representing neither the human diet nor HFCS, have misled the uninformed and created an atmosphere of distrust and avoidance for what, by all rights, should be considered a safe and innocuous sweetener. In the first part of this article, common misconceptions about the composition, functionality, metabolism, and use of HFCS and its purported link to obesity are identified and corrected. In the second part, an emerging misconception, that HFCS in carbonated soft drinks contributes materially to physiological levels of reactive dicarbonyl compounds and advanced glycation endproducts, is addressed in detail, and evidence is presented that HFCS does not pose a unique dietary risk in healthy individuals or diabetics.

Gas Masks, Pogo, and the Ecological Indian: Earth Day and the Visual Politics of American Environmentalism

This essay offers a new way of understanding a pivotal moment in the history of U.S. environmentalism: the time surrounding the first celebration of Earth Day in 1970. By exploring a wide array of visual images produced during this period and paying particular attention to pictures of people wearing gas masks, the comic strip character Pogo, and the figure of the Ecological Indian, the article examines the complex relationship between the mass media and multiple forms of environmentalism. These images personalized the sense of risk and responsibility by presenting all Americans as equally vulnerable to pollution and equally to blame for environmental degradation. When placed in dialogue with both mainstream and subaltern environmental movements as well as with public policy, the images reveal a paradox embedded in the environmental politics of the era: the state expanded its environmental regulatory agenda, even as the visual media repeatedly emphasized individual responsibility for the environmental crisis. This essay explains how these seemingly opposing trends actually reinforced one another and how they bequeathed a problematic legacy to U.S. environmentalism. Ultimately, the media, mainstream environmental groups, and public policy all failed to consider the links between social inequality and the disproportionate experience of risk among racialized minorities. Across these different fields, subaltern perspectives were submerged, drowned out by the repeated insistence upon universal danger and culpability. Earth Day, often described as a moment of origins for modern environmentalism, thus helped frame and validate a particular conception of the movement as a cause that promised to unite the nation but that lacked a social edge.

Defining the characteristics of a lingering crisis: Lessons from the National Zoo

This article begins to define the characteristics of a new type of organizational crisis—a “lingering crisis.” A qualitative case study involving the National Zoo indicated that a lingering crisis may involve (1) multiple events occurring over an extended timeframe; (2) intense media scrutiny; (3) escalating involvement of external organizations, including watchdog/regulatory/oversight agencies; (4) incongruent organizational messages and stakeholder perceptions; (5) external/internal charges of organizational deception; (6) insufficient organizational responses to stakeholder concerns; (7) organizational failure to address leadership responsibility for crisis.

Hong Kong Consumers' Evaluation in an Airline Crash: A Path Model Analysis

An experimental study was conducted to investigate Hong Kong consumers' evaluation process in an airline crisis. Three hundred and eighty-five participants (123 men, 227 women, and 35 unidentified) participated in a 2 (causal attribution: internal and external) × 6 (crisis response: shifting the blame, minimization, no comment, compensation, corrective action, and apology) × 2 (crisis severity: severe and extremely severe) between-subject experimental design. Participants were measured on (a) perceived organizational responsibility for crisis, (b) impression toward the organization, (c) degree of trust in the organization, and (d) purchase intention. A path model depicting Hong Kong consumers' evaluation process in organizational crisis was derived. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings were discussed.

Five Attitudes Toward Nature and Technology from a Christian Perspective1

Challenged by Lynn White's sharp criticism of Christianity's responsibility for earth's ecological crisis, both Ian Barbour and Philip Hefner have proposed theological anthropologies based upon the imago Dei that supports an ecological ethic. Russell, while supporting the ecological ethic, turns not to anthropology but rather to eschatology and the proleptic vision of a new creation.

The Crisis of the Philippine National Bank and Its Political Consequences: 1919-1922

This paper first discusses the nature of the crisis faced by the Philippine National Bank that was directly related to the collapse of the currency reserve fund during 1919-1922, then the political consequences of the financial crisis in the Philippine Legislature under American colonial rule during the early 1920s is discussed.The Philippine National Bank was established in 1916 as the multi-purpose semi-governmental bank to provide loans for the agricultural export industry, extending business as a commercial bank, and issuing bank notes while depositing government funds. In 1917 the National Bank opened its New York agency, and soon larger parts of Philippine currency reserves, such as the Gold Standard Fund and the Silver Certificate Reserve (these two were combined into the Currency Reserve Fund in 1918) were deposited in the New York agency. The currency reserves were Philippine government funds that the National Bank could not utilize for its own purpose. However, strangely enough, most of the currency reserves were transferred to the Manila office of the National Bank by the end of 1918 through the following method. Making use of currency reserves as its own capital, the bank issued bank notes to provide a large amount of loans for export businesses. As a result, the Philippine economy incurred hyper-inflation and exhausted currency reserves.Why did this happen? The US government sent the Wood-Forbes Mission to investigate Philippine political and financial conditions in 1921. Its purpose was to examine the Filipino people's ability to govern themselves in not only political and legislative, but also financial and economic affairs. The most serious financial and economic matters were the near bankruptcy of the Philippine National Bank and the collapse of the currency reserve system. The Mission concluded that the incompetence of bank officials was the cause of the deep financial and economic crisis that had hit the Philippines. This observation was widely accepted in the Philippines, and one of main issues for Filipino political leaders became who should take responsibility for the crisis: Sergio Osmeña or Manuel L. Quezon, the most powerful leaders in Philippine politics, both from the Nacionalista Party. In this situation, it was Quezon who opened fire against Osmeña. At the end of 1921, Quezon, taking advantage of his No. 2 position in Philippine politics, started criticizing the sole leadership of Osmeña, emphasizing Osmeña's responsibility for the financial crisis. The Nacionalistas were split into two: the Nacionalista Colectivistas led by Quezon and the Nacionalista Unipersonalistas led by Osmeña. It was Quezon who won the struggle. When the two Nacionalista parties were merged into one Nacionalista Consolidado party, Quezon became president, with Osmeña as vice-president.To conclude, the rivalry between Quezon and Osmeña was an outcome of the political impact of the Wood-Forbes Mission report on the Philippine society, but not a direct outcome of the financial and economic crisis in the Philippine government. The mismanagement of the Philippine National Bank and the collapse of the currency reserve system were caused by the combined elements of the weak structure of the American colonial government in the Philippines, where American officials, both in Manila and Washington, DC, were also deeply involved.

American Canvas: A Roundtable on the 1997 NEA Report

On October 13, 1997, the New York Times ran a front-page story with the bombshell headline “Study Links Drop in Support to Elitist Attitude in the Arts.” The study is American Canvas, a 190-page book published by the National Endowment for the Arts and intended, in the words of its now-departed chairman, Jane Alexander, to look at the “ecology of the arts process … and at different models for stabilization and survival” (4). The Times story set off a feeding frenzy in the national news media. Many journalists were eager to subject the endowment and artists to the contempt that the media and politicians had poured on them in 1989, when the endowment crisis began. What made the Times article so shocking to many arts professionals who had exhausted themselves fighting for the endowment's survival was its assertion that the endowment was now placing the responsibility for the current crisis in arts funding squarely on the shoulders of the art world. No one and nothing else shared the blame, not Jesse Helms, the Christian Coalition, museum boards, the news media, or the NEA itself.

Value Theory: Towards Conceptual Clarification

It is the contention of this paper that there has been a pronounced tendency in sociology to under-emphasize the study of values and moral issues, and that the cause of this is twofold: the cultural and organizational climate within which sociologists operate and the lack of consensus among them on a conceptual framework within which accumulative research on values could occur. The broad outlines of such a model will be offered in an effort to initiate a revival of constructive debate on value theory, and a few possible implications for future research on values will be suggested. Why should sociology be concerned with the study of values? The obvious reason is that they may well provide the key to a more adequate understanding of man in society. But accompanying this is a certain moral imperative which impinges on the sociologist as a member of humanity at this particular moment in time. A lack of progress in the application of organized intelligence to the choice of goals for humanity is everywhere apparent. It could be argued that the kind of disciplined assault on the problem that the scientific approach to knowing can provide is long overdue. Furthermore, the possibility that sociology itself may bear some responsibility for mankind's current moral crisis cannot be summarily dismissed. The myth of the possibility of 'objectively' documenting reality, so unquestioningly accepted by sociologists anxious to achieve 'scientific' status, seems now to have spread to a majority of those involved in the humanities and the arts. The fetish of realism-too often manifested as a detailed portrayal of pathology in the name of the whole truth-is widely indulged in by the very 'creative' intellectuals who scorn the social scientists for their conformist scientism. Ironically, both groups may be operating from identical outmoded assumptions about the possibility of a detached type of objectivity, and about the individual's lack of responsibility for his personal contribution to the shaping of the values which in turn shape humanity.1 The reaction of a large segment of the youth subculture to this 'disinterested' pursuit of truth-and its accompanying fascination with

Responsibility for the Ecological Crisis

The message is going out that humanity is in the midst of an environmental crisis of global proportions. Two processes appear to be out of control--population growth and technology. Millions of our race are malnourished and hungry, our urban areas are growing more dense and are reaching out like a cancer into the surrounding countryside, our air and water are fouled with by-products and wastes. We can hardly be thought of as living in harmony with our environment-one of the most obvious criteria for success as a