Wealthy Societies Research Articles

Europe in Crisis: What Lessons to Learn?

Nothing feeds jolly bankers and dyspeptic pundits more than a tasty crisis, and this year's turmoil over the Euro has provided an especially rich diet to critics of state-owned enterprises and public sector social programs. "What we're seeing in Greece is the death spiral of the welfare state," wrote the columnist Robert J. Samuelson. "Virtually every advanced nation, including the United States, faces the same prospect. Aging populations have been promised huge health and retirement benefits, which countries haven't fully covered with taxes. The reckoning has arrived in Greece, but it awaits most wealthy societies." Harvard economist Jeffrey A. Miron honed the knife even sharper. "Tax increases will not fix things," he wrote. "Only major cutbacks in entitlements can avoid fiscal collapse."

Unemployment among immigrants in European labour markets: an analysis of origin and destination effects

This article presents a multilevel analysis of 1363 male and female first- and second-generation immigrants’ unemployment rates. In addition to individual characteristics, the effects of macro-characteristics of 13 destination countries in the EU and of more than 100 origin countries of the immigrants are analysed. Immigrants are found to be more often unemployed in countries where natives have higher unemployment rates. Immigrants’ unemployment rates are lower in countries with a larger segment of low-status jobs, with higher immigration rates and with a higher GDP per capita. Destination countries’ integration policies and welfare state regimes do not affect the unemployment risk of immigrants. At the level of origin countries, immigrants from more politically stable and free, more developed and more wealthy societies are found to be less often unemployed. Immigrants coming from Islamic countries have higher rates of unemployment, while those originating from Western Europe are less likely to be unemployed.

Searching for Cost-Optimized Interstellar Beacons

What would SETI beacon transmitters be like if built by civilizations that had a variety of motives but cared about cost? In a companion paper, we presented how, for fixed power density in the far field, a cost-optimum interstellar beacon system could be built. Here, we consider how we should search for a beacon if it were produced by a civilization similar to ours. High-power transmitters could be built for a wide variety of motives other than the need for two-way communication; this would include beacons built to be seen over thousands of light-years. Extraterrestrial beacon builders would likely have to contend with economic pressures just as their terrestrial counterparts do. Cost, spectral lines near 1 GHz, and interstellar scintillation favor radiating frequencies substantially above the classic "water hole." Therefore, the transmission strategy for a distant, cost-conscious beacon would be a rapid scan of the galactic plane with the intent to cover the angular space. Such pulses would be infrequent events for the receiver. Such beacons built by distant, advanced, wealthy societies would have very different characteristics from what SETI researchers seek. Future searches should pay special attention to areas along the galactic disk where SETI searches have seen coherent signals that have not recurred on the limited listening time intervals we have used. We will need to wait for recurring events that may arrive in intermittent bursts. Several new SETI search strategies have emerged from these ideas. We propose a new test for beacons that is based on the Life Plane hypotheses.

Language Socialization in the Workplace

This survey article looks first at the changing demands of the workplace in a globalized economy. The new work order creates a new word order, and the workforce has become a “wordforce” (Heller, in press) with new genres of language and communication. These changes have taken place at a time when global flows of people, from less wealthy and secure societies to more wealthy and secure ones, have created multilingual workplaces. Both sets of changes challenge the traditional notion of second language socialization, and this is the focus of the next section. The workplace represents a complex, dynamic setting where migrants experience a double socialization: into the hybrid discourses of the workplace, which all newcomers experience, and into the specific language and cultural practices that realize these discourses. The new language requirements of the workplace produce for migrant workers and professionals a “linguistic penalty” (Roberts & Campbell, 2006) since the communicative demands of the selection process may be greater than those of the job itself. The last section of the article is concerned with language socialization in multilingual settings where language socialization into the dominant language is only part of the story. There is a contrast between the low status multilingualism of migrant workers, and staff in globalized and international organizations who are being socialized into new lingua franca interaction. The article concludes with an example of how the complex linguistic and technical environment of a high-tech multilingual company produces radically different conditions for language socialization which challenge how this notion can be used in the 21st century.

The Moral Imperative and Social Rationality of Government-Guaranteed Employment and Reskilling

Unemployment exacts a high cost to its victims, not only in lost income, but also in terms of quality of life (insecurity, depression, abandoned families, divorce, suicide and poorer health). It also exacts a high cost to society in terms of lost output, foregone tax revenue, depreciating human capital, and increased costs of welfare, crime and health care. Yet modern wealthy societies have, principally for the sake of price stability and to avoid the budget costs of a full remedy, chosen to tolerate a substantial level of permanent unemployment. This article explores the moral conditions of this social choice and its rationality in terms of social welfare. It makes and develops support for two claims: society's tolerance of involuntary unemployment is morally wrong, and it is socially and economically irrational. It concludes that government should guarantee employment by serving as employer of last resort and where appropriate provide for retraining.

<b>Propriedade intelectual e inovação na agricultura e saúde</b>

Intellectual property has come to assume an ever more important role in modern societies, whose development is associated with technological progress and the creative and entrepreneurial capacity of individuals and businesses. The present and future vector of development is innovation in all its dimensions – including the reinvention of the life styles of wealthy societies whose expansion is clearly unsustainable. In this sense, the present work’s purpose is to demonstrate that Brazil has created an institutional brand suitable for the intellectual property protection, however, that brand is only one condition, in some necessary sectors, but not enough, to promote innovation. It needs, more than appropriate rules, to develop the capacity to innovate and create an innovation friendly environment. Intellectual property is only one, without doubt important, element of this complex system. It has taken agriculture to illustrate how intellectual property needs to be followed up by investments in human resources, local training, business demand, private-public interaction, in order to yield fruit and promote the country’s development.

Intellectual property and innovation in agriculture and health

Intellectual property has come to assume an ever more important role in modern societies, whose development is associated with technological progress and the creative and entrepreneurial capacity of individuals and businesses. The present and future vector of development is innovation in all its dimensions – including the reinvention of the life styles of wealthy societies whose expansion is clearly unsustainable. In this sense, the present work’s purpose is to demonstrate that Brazil has created an institutional brand suitable for the intellectual property protection, however, that brand is only one condition, in some necessary sectors, but not enough, to promote innovation. It needs, more than appropriate rules, to develop the capacity to innovate and create an innovation friendly environment. Intellectual property is only one, without doubt important, element of this complex system. It has taken agriculture to illustrate how intellectual property needs to be followed up by investments in human resources, local training, business demand, private-public interaction, in order to yield fruit and promote the country’s development.

Rethinking personal sacrifice

Conventional wisdom suggests that addressing environmental ills will require wealthy societies to sacrifice their standards of living. But that depends on how you view sacrifice.

Rethinking personal sacrifice

Conventional wisdom suggests that addressing environmental ills will require wealthy societies to sacrifice their standards of living. But that depends on how you view sacrifice.

Immigration and Freedom of Association

In this article I appeal to freedom of association to defend a state’s right to control immigration over its territorial borders. Without denying that those of us in wealthy societies may have extremely demanding duties of global distributive justice, I ultimately reach the stark conclusion that every legitimate state has the right to close its doors to all potential immigrants, even refugees desperately seeking asylum from incompetent or corrupt political regimes that are either unable or unwilling to protect their citizens’ basic moral rights. This article is divided into four sections. First, I argue for a presumptive case in favor of a state’s right to limit immigration as an instance of its more general right to freedom of association. In the second and third sections, I respond to egalitarian and libertarian cases for open borders. Finally, in the fourth section, I consider the permissibility of screening immigrants based upon their race, ethnicity or religion.

Maternal safety: what is the cost?

The hallmark of a modern, wealthy and caring society is how well it provides pregnancy and newborn care. It is a measure of how much that society treasures the very seed corn of the next economic generation. With economic buoyancy and increased investment in the NHS, there should be clear benchmarks to measure improvements against expenditure.

What Can We Expect of Our Health Care System? : Introduction

IN NOVEMBER 2006 the Queensland Centre for Public Health and the Brisbane Institute cohosted a public forum titled ?What can we expect of our health care system?? The intention of the forum was to promote public discussion on serious questions about the long-term sustainability of the health care system. Even as health care expenditure has grown, demand for service remains unmet and appears inexhaustible. Expensive new technologies and drugs, a population living longer with more chronic disease, and declining workforce capacity indicate a worsening of the current situation. The gap between our demand for health care and the capacity of the system appears likely to increase. In light of such a scenario, this forum considered what citizens can reasonably expect of their health system. Consumer expectations are a large part of the health care equation. In Australia, a wealthy society with egalitarian traditions, the great majority of people expect to be provided with the most advanced medical treatment available. In contrast with an earlier historical period in which life was viewed as far more contingent and unpredictable, we now routinely expect to live long and fulfilled lives, with the aid of sophisticated health care. Are contemporary expectations realistic? Are we entitled to believe that expensive technology and drugs should be available to everyone, irrespective of time, place, or stage of life? Have we arrived at a situation in which life has been valued too highly? Do current trends risk creating an inequitable and dysfunctional health care system? Is it possible to constrain expectations without compromising standards of care? The forum featured presentations and a panel discussion involving a range of expert speakers, decision makers, analysts and stakeholders. The following two papers by Dr Stephen Begg and Professor Peter Brooks have been submitted as an outcome of the forum. Dr Martin Leet Senior Research Officer, The Brisbane Institute Kathleen Lilley Manager, Queensland Centre for Public Health

Eating behaviour and obesity

Eating behaviour and obesity

Environmental Realism: From Apologetics to Substance

This article assesses the cornucopian theory of the mastery of plastic nature. Serious deficiencies are found, especially the theory's complacent faith in economic rationality and its underestimation of nature's capacity for unexpected emergent disturbances. Conclusions about the real state of the world and realistic expectations for the future must take into account not only present trends, but also the findings of research into disasters and societies that have collapsed. Learning from the analysis of such discontinuities and breaking points will help to avoid simplistic presumptions of safety based on extrapolating time-series trends of present well-being in wealthy societies into the distant future. It is precisely disaster research and studies of collapsed societies that can teach us about failures of foresight concerning nature's dynamics, about the material consequences of such errors, about the uncertainties involved in foreseeing nature's emergent dynamics, and about social barriers to learning from the prompts of nature. Although apologetics for business-as-usual, full-steam-ahead practices that masquerade as realism should be rejected, a deeper realism that has learned to expect the unexpected from nature is necessary. Such a critical realist perspective for investigating prompts from nature has been elaborated in this article.

Where Do Cultures Come From?

This article seeks to make three separate contributions to the anthropological study of culture. Metatheoretically, it presents an evolutionary psychological perspective within which to study culture and generate specific theories of the origins, constancy, and variations in human culture. Theoretically, it provides a concrete evolutionary psychological theory of son-daughter preference: why people in some societies prefer sons to daughters and practice female infanticide whereas those in others prefer daughters to sons and practice male infanticide (killingof boys). Empirically, it tests and supports an evolutionary psychological theory of son-daughter preference with large, international quantitative data both at the micro (individual) and macro (societal) levels. The empirical analyses show that wealthier individuals from 46 nations prefer sons to daughters, whereas poorer individuals prefer daughters to sons. They also suggest that wealthier societies have cultural preference for sons, whereas poorer societies have cultural preference for daughters.

Evidence-based prescribing of statins: a developing world perspective.

ver the last decade, landmark clinical trials (summarized in Tables 1 and 2) have shown that statin therapy reduces coronary events in patients with or without prior cardiovascular disease [1–12]. More recent studies, summarized in Table 3, show that the larger the statin dosage, the greater the reduction in cardiovascular clinical events [13–17]. A meta-analysis involving 90,056 patients in 14 randomized trials emphasizes that the benefi t of statin treatment is not limited to a reduction in coronary disease; treatment also reduces the incidence of strokes, coronary revascularization, and coronary and total mortality [18].But statins are expensive, and clinicians and policymakers must objectively review the literature so that statin therapy can be appropriately initiated and be cost effective. In developing countries, where a changing lifestyle is increasing the incidence of cardiovascular disease, the need to be cost effective is even more pressing. This paper attempts to derive a fair and evidence-based answer to four practical questions that are especially relevant in less wealthy societies: (1) In whom and when should statin therapy be initiated? (2) What lipid level should physicians aim for? (3) Do different ethnic groups respond differently to statins? and (4) Are statins cost effective?

Social accounting in Islamic political economy

PurposeTo explore the outer reaches of buying, selling, property rights in an Islamic context.Design/methodology/approachPhilosophical, applying legal analysis, critique to the work of Richard Epstein.FindingsThat there are no exceptions to the general rule that, under full free enterprise, anything must be allowed to be purchased, sold or given away.Research limitations/implicationsTo attain a system of laissez‐faire capitalism, the law should be changed so as to recognize voluntary slave contracts.Practical implicationsThere would be very few or none in an advanced wealthy society. However, there might be some in the underdeveloped world.Originality/valueIt advances one's knowledge of the marketplace, law and contracts.

The wealthy get healthy, the poor get poorly? Lay perceptions of health inequalities

Research repeatedly identifies an association between health and socio-economic status—richer people are healthier than poorer people. Richard Wilkinson has posited that socio-psychological mechanisms may be part of the explanation for the fact that socio-economic inequalities run right across the social spectrum in wealthy societies. He argues that polarised income distributions within countries have a negative impact on stress, self-esteem and social relations which, in turn, impact on physical well-being. How people experience and perceive inequalities is central to his thesis. However, relatively little empirical work has explored such lay perceptions. We attempt to address this gap by exploring how people see inequality, how they theorise its impact on health, and the extent to which they make personal and social comparisons, by drawing on 14 focus group discussions in Scotland and the north of England. Contrary to other research which suggests that people from more deprived backgrounds are more reluctant to acknowledge the effects of socio-economic deprivation, our findings demonstrate that, in some contexts at least, people from less favourable circumstances converse in a way to suggest that inequalities deeply affect their health and well-being. We discuss these findings in the light of the methodological challenges presented for pursuing such research.

Bounded-rational-prisoners’ dilemma: On critical phenomena of cooperation

Models based on agents has been widely used to study the paradigmatic emergence of cooperation in social systems. In the spatial prisoners’ dilemma game introduced by Martin Nowak and Robert May, the agents are greedy and imitate indiscriminately the action of the wealthiest neighbor. Other strategies, for example stochastic or pavlovian, have also been considered showing similar results as the greedy rule. That is, in general matter, the asymptotic emergence or maintenance of cooperation. For these spatial models, it can be proved, and that is the dilemma, that cooperation extinguishes when agents exhibit completely rational behavior. In this work, we explore the behavior of a system with bounded-rational agents. For that, we consider a modified spatial prisoners’ dilemma on an adaptive network where each agent can play different actions with different neighbors. The coevolutive dynamic obeys a scheme of rational imitation of the wealthiest agent of each neighborhood. We show the existence of a phase transition (absence of cooperation–presence of cooperation) that depends on the incentive to defect. We compute the critical value and report a simulation study that evidences that the emergence or survival of cooperation at the steady state is a critical phenomenon. These results provide a fascinating point of view to understand the trade-off between cooperation and rationality in wealthy societies. Our results also include the emergence of a rich social structure living in asymptotic regimen. Throughout a simulation study, we analyze the distribution of wealth and other complex aspects of the social network at the steady state.

The political economy of redistribution under democracy

We ask what redistributions of income and assets are feasible in a democracy, given the initial assets and their distribution. The question is motivated by the possibility that if redistribution is insufficient for the poor or excessive for the rich, they may turn against democracy. In turn, if no redistribution simultaneously satisfies the poor and the wealthy, democracy cannot be sustained. Hence, the corollary question concerns the conditions under which democracy is sustainable. We find that democracies survive in wealthy societies. Conditional on the initial income distribution and the capacity of the poor and the wealthy to overthrow democracy, each country has a threshold of capital stock above which democracy survives. This threshold is lower when the distribution of initial endowments is more equal and when the revolutionary prowess of these groups is lower. Yet in poor unequal countries there exist no redistribution scheme which would be accepted both by the poor and the wealthy. Hence, democracy cannot survive. As endowments increase, redistribution schemes that satisfy both the poor and the wealthy emerge. Moreover, as capital stock grows the wealthy tolerate more and the poor less redistribution, so that the set of feasible redistributions becomes larger. Since the median voter prefers one such scheme to the dictatorship of either group, democracy survives.