In 1974 an article appeared in Science magazine with the dry-sounding title “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases” by a pair of psychologists who were not well known outside their discipline of decision theory. In it Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman introduced the world to Prospect Theory, which mapped out how humans actually behave when faced with decisions about gains and losses, in contrast to how economists assumed that people behave. Prospect Theory turned Economics on its head by demonstrating through a series of ingenious experiments that people are much more concerned with losses than they are with gains, and that framing a choice from one perspective or the other will result in decisions that are exactly the opposite of each other, even if the outcomes are monetarily the same. Prospect Theory led cognitive psychology in a new direction that began to uncover other human biases in thinking that are probably not learned but are part of our brain’s wiring.

Thinking fast and slow.

How to ... be a reflective practitioner.

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The Theory of Industrial Organization

For the first time in the twentieth century most adults in many innercity ghetto neighborhoods are not working in a typical week. The disappearance of work has adversely affected not only individuals, families, and neighborhoods, but the social life of the city at large as well. Inner-city joblessness is a severe problem that is often overlooked or obscured when the focus is placed mainly on poverty and its consequences. Despite increases in the concentration of poverty since 1970, inner cities have always featured high levels of poverty, but the current levels of joblessness in some neighborhoods are unprecedented. The consequences of high neighborhood joblessness are more devastating than those of high neighborhood poverty. A neighborhood in which people are poor but employed is different from a neighborhood in which people are poor and jobless. Many of today's problems in the inner-city ghetto neighborhoodscrime, family dissolution, welfare, low levels of social organization, and so onare fundamentally a consequence of the disappearance of work. The disappearance of work and the growth of related problems in the ghetto have aggravated an already tense racial situation in urban areas. Our nation's response to racial discord in the central city and to the growing racial divide between the city and the suburbs has been disappointing. In discussing these problems we have a tendency to engage in the kind of rhetoric that exacerbates, rather than alleviates, urban and metropolitan racial tensions. Ever since the 1992 Los Angeles riot, the media have focused heavily on the factors that divide rather than those that unite racial groups. Emphasis on racial division peaked in 1995 following the jury's verdict in the 0. J. Simpson murder trial. Before

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2152085.pdf

When Work Disappears

The East Asian miracle: Economic growth and public policy: By the World Bank. (New York: Oxford University Press for the World Bank, 1993. 389 pp. $19.95, paper.)

This collection brings together a wide range of views on the conceptualization and measurement of social exclusion and the indicators for monitoring the effectiveness of policies for combating social exclusion.

Beyond the threshold: The measurement and analysis of social exclusion

Written by a team of internationally respected experts, this book explores the conditions under which social policy, defined as the public pursuit of secure welfare, operates in the poorer regions of the world. Social policy in advanced capitalist countries operates through state intervention to compensate for the inadequate welfare outcomes of the labour market. Such welfare regimes cannot easily be reproduced in poorer regions of the world where states suffer problems of governance and labour markets are imperfect and partial. Other welfare regimes therefore prevail involving non-state actors such as landlords, moneylenders and patrons. This book seeks to develop a conceptual framework for understanding different types of welfare regime in a range of countries in Asia, Latin America and Africa and makes an important contribution to the literature by breaking away from the traditional focus on Europe and North America.

Insecurity and welfare regimes in Asia, Africa and Latin America

Introduction Esping-Andersen (1990; 1999) has developed a typology of welfare regimes for developed countries. His analysis focuses on the production of welfare, understood as the articulation of welfare programmes and institutions – including the state, markets and households – insuring households against social risks. In his later book he notes that understanding welfare regimes, and their change over time, involves ‘(a) a diagnosis of the changing distribution and intensity of social risks, and (b) a comprehensive examination of how risks are pooled between state, market, and family’ (Esping-Andersen 1999: 33). This chapter undertakes this task for Latin America. The welfare regime approach can provide a much-needed framework enabling a comprehensive analysis of changes in welfare production in Latin America, including the study of the linkages existing between social protection and labour market institutions, and an evaluation of the outcomes of these changes. There is important research on specific programmes or institutions, but few have attempted to compare and integrate their findings. Extending this framework beyond its original focus on industrialised nations can provide a valuable new dimension, and the chapter will consider whether the fundamental change in economic and social institutions undergone by most countries in Latin America provides a rare example of a welfare regime shift. The chapter is organised as follows. The next section identifies welfare systems in Latin America and the Caribbean. The following section considers the welfare mix prior to recent social protection and labour market reform and identifies a welfare regime for Latin America.

Insecurity and Welfare Regimes in Asia, Africa and Latin America: Latin America : towards a liberal-informal welfare regime

Introduction Ian Gough and Geof Wood Part I. Understanding Insecurity and Welfare Regimes in the South: An Analytical Framework: 1. Adapting welfare regimes to development contexts Ian Gough 2. Informal security regimes: embedding social policy in the search for a secure institutional landscape Geof Wood 3. Conceptualising in/security regimes Philippa Bevan Part II. Regional Regimes: 4. Latin America: towards a liberal-informal welfare regime Armando Barrientos 5. East Asia: the limits of productivist regimes Ian Gough 6. The dynamics of Africa's in/security regimes Philippa Bevan Part III. Regimes in Global Context: 7. Rethinking the welfare regime approach in the context of Bangladesh Peter Davis 8. Multi-tiered international welfare systems Graham Room Conclusion Geof Wood and Ian Gough.

Insecurity and Welfare Regimes in Asia, Africa and Latin America: Social Policy in Development Contexts

During the 1990s, the notion of “social exclusion” has given a new impetus to the debate about poverty and disadvantage. This paper assesses the extent of conceptual reconfiguration that the concept of social exclusion involves and the implications for empirical research and policy evaluation. It proceeds to examine critically the extent to which current notions of social exclusion risk neglecting patterns of inequality in the wider society. It concludes by arguing that the globalization of our market economies is tending to erode the support which more advantaged groups are ready to offer and to force retrenchment of the formal welfare organizations on which the poor can call. In a global economy, moral solidarity with the disadvantaged atrophies, and the national communities within which the postwar welfare states were built no longer serve as the focus for good neighbourliness.

Graham Room

Papers

Beyond the threshold: The measurement and analysis of social exclusion

Insecurity and welfare regimes in Asia, Africa and Latin America

Insecurity and Welfare Regimes in Asia, Africa and Latin America: Latin America : towards a liberal-informal welfare regime

Insecurity and Welfare Regimes in Asia, Africa and Latin America: Social Policy in Development Contexts

Social exclusion, solidarity and the challenge of globalization