The present historical moment may seem a particularly inopportune time to review Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam's latest exploration of civic decline in America. After all, the outpouring of volunteerism, solidarity, patriotism, and self-sacrifice displayed by Americans in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks appears to fly in the face of Putnam's central argument: that \"social capital\" -defined as \"social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them\" (p. 19)'has declined to dangerously low levels in America over the last three decades. However, Putnam is not fazed in the least by the recent effusion of solidarity. Quite the contrary, he sees in it the potential to \"reverse what has been a 30to 40-year steady decline in most measures of connectedness or community.\"' As an example of how the current \"war on terrorism\" could generate a durable civic renewal, Putnam points to the burst in civic practices that occurred during and after World War II, which he says \"permanently marked\" the generation that lived through it and had a \"terrific effect on American public life over the last half-century.\" 3 If Americans can follow this example and channel their current civic

Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community

A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

A Treatise on the Family

This paper reviews the concept of adaptation of human communities to global changes, especially climate change, in the context of adaptive capacity and vulnerability. It focuses on scholarship that contributes to practical implementation of adaptations at the community scale. In numerous social science fields, adaptations are considered as responses to risks associated with the interaction of environmental hazards and human vulnerability or adaptive capacity. In the climate change field, adaptation analyses have been undertaken for several distinct purposes. Impact assessments assume adaptations to estimate damages to longer term climate scenarios with and without adjustments. Evaluations of specified adaptation options aim to identify preferred measures. Vulnerability indices seek to provide relative vulnerability scores for countries, regions or communities. The main purpose of participatory vulnerability assessments is to identify adaptation strategies that are feasible and practical in communities. The distinctive features of adaptation analyses with this purpose are outlined, and common elements of this approach are described. Practical adaptation initiatives tend to focus on risks that are already problematic, climate is considered together with other environmental and social stresses, and adaptations are mostly integrated or mainstreamed into other resource management, disaster preparedness and sustainable development programs. r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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Adaptation, adaptive capacity and vulnerability

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The Precariat. The New Dangerous Class

Thank you very much for reading input output analysis foundations and extensions. As you may know, people have search hundreds times for their chosen readings like this input output analysis foundations and extensions, but end up in infectious downloads. Rather than reading a good book with a cup of coffee in the afternoon, instead they are facing with some malicious virus inside their desktop computer.

Input Output Analysis Foundations And Extensions

Fundamental changes are currently taking place in the composition and distribution of the British population. These include the increasing numbers of very elderly, massive fluctuations in age structure arising from the baby boom and bust of the 1960s and 1970s, the rising proportion of non-family households, the growth of ethnic minority populations and the continuing exodus of people from the larger cities and declining industrial areas. These changes are having major impacts on the size and characteristics of the populations of individual localities, and have implications for business and governments. The purpose of this book is to examine the scale and significance of the local dimensions of these developments and the implications for central government, complementing the existing literature which focuses almost entirely on the overall national picture. It contains a set of ten original studies which demonstrate the existence of marked geographical variations in population profiles and trends and highlight the main implications and responses. The focus is primarily on those policy areas where there needs to be a local-scale mechanism for decision-making and implementation, such as education, labour recruitment, house-building needs, social services and health care. The book is intended mainly for second and third year students reading demography, geography, planning, or social studies, but sufficient background on demographic developments and policy context is given to interest a wider readership of professionals and laypersons. Publication is timed to coincide with the release of the local and small area statistics from the 1991 Population Census, and individual chapters give guidance on follow-up work which can use the new data to update and extend the research on the various topics presented here.

Fall-out from the demographic time-bomb : a spatial perspective on the labour force effects of the "baby-bust"

This chapter provides an evaluative overview of selected key features of continuity and change in the geography of non-employment in Britain in the 1980s, using a range of indicators from various data sources at different spatial scales. The concepts of unemployment, inactivity and nonemployment are reviewed in the first section of the chapter, and the different statistical sources and geographical units referred to subsequently are outlined. In the second section the main emphasis is on outlining selected features of changing geographical patterns of non-employment, rather than attempting to 'explain' them in a comprehensive fashion. Amongst the changes reviewed are the convergence of regional unemployment rates in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and geographical variations in timing of entry into recession in 1979 and 1989/90. Substantial intra-regional variations in unemployment are highlighted, and the tendency for an increasing proportion of variation in local unemployment rates to be accounted for by intra-regional, rather than inter-regional, differences is reviewed. The disproportionate relative increase in unemployment in the country's large urban areas is identified as a major feature of change in the 1980s, with non-employment becoming increasingly extensive in many urban labour markets. A discussion of the concept of segregation follows in the third section of the chapter. A range of measures of different aspects of segregation are operationalised using data from the Census of Population, and the main features of geographical patterns of segregation of non-employed sub-groups are outlined. In particular, the increasing segregation of the non-employed in the largest cities is highlighted. The final section is concerned with synthesising the empirical evidence presented and highlighting the implications for policy.

The changing geography of unemployment and non-employment in Britain

In Northern Ireland a peaceful and inclusive society can only be created if substantial inequalities can be eroded or eliminated Fair employment is of paramount importance in achieving this and it has been one of the most important areas of public policy interventions in Northern Ireland in the past generation In trying to provide greater equality in employment between the two ethno-religious communities, fair employment has been at the heart of the conflict in the province In this new and important study nine contributors evaluate the effectiveness of fair employment policies and also to identify areas where there is still work to be done These various contributions not only discuss social and legal changes and shifts in the labor market in the last thirty years, but also give pressing reasons why policy makers may need to think about equality in fresh ways

Anne E. Green

Papers

Fall-out from the demographic time-bomb : a spatial perspective on the labour force effects of the "baby-bust"

The changing geography of unemployment and non-employment in Britain

A place apart/ The Northern Ireland labour market in wider context

Progression into higher education

Buckinghamshire skills study