https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.2307%2F3343168.pdf

Development as Freedom

Lincoln, Yvonna, and Egon Guba, "Postpositivism and the Naturalist Paradigm," pp. 14-46 in Yvonna Lincoln and Egon Guba, Naturalistic Inquiry . Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1985.*

NUDGE: IMPROVING DECISIONS ABOUT HEALTH, WEALTH, AND HAPPINESS by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein Penguin Books, 2009, 312 pp, ISBN 978-0-14-311526-7This book is best described formally as a general explanation of and advocacy for libertarian paternalism, a term coined by the authors in earlier publications. Informally, it is about how leaders, systems, organizations, and governments can nudge people to do the things the nudgers want and need done for the betterment of the nudgees, or of society. It is paternalism in the sense that "it is legitimate for choice architects to try to influence people's behavior in order to make their lives longer, healthier, and better", (p. 5) It is libertarian in that "people should be free to do what they like - and to opt out of undesirable arrangements if they want to do so", (p. 5) The built-in possibility of opting out or making a different choice preserves freedom of choice even though people's behavior has been influenced by the nature of the presentation of the information or by the structure of the decisionmaking system. I had never heard of libertarian paternalism before reading this book, and I now find it fascinating.Written for a general audience, this book contains mostly social and behavioral science theory and models, but there is considerable discussion of structure and process that has roots in mathematical and quantitative modeling. One of the main applications of this social system is economic choice in investing, selecting and purchasing products and services, systems of taxes, banking (mortgages, borrowing, savings), and retirement systems. Other quantitative social choice systems discussed include environmental effects, health care plans, gambling, and organ donations. Softer issues that are also subject to a nudge-based approach are marriage, education, eating, drinking, smoking, influence, spread of information, and politics. There is something in this book for everyone.The basis for this libertarian paternalism concept is in the social theory called "science of choice", the study of the design and implementation of influence systems on various kinds of people. The terms Econs and Humans, are used to refer to people with either considerable or little rational decision-making talent, respectively. The various libertarian paternalism concepts and systems presented are tested and compared in light of these two types of people. Two foundational issues that this book has in common with another book, Network of Echoes: Imitation, Innovation and Invisible Leaders, that was also reviewed for this issue of the Journal are that 1 ) there are two modes of thinking (or components of the brain) - an automatic (intuitive) process and a reflective (rational) process and 2) the need for conformity and the desire for imitation are powerful forces in human behavior. …

Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness

Frantz Fanon’s explosive Black Skin, White Masks is a merciless expose of the psychological damage done by colonial rule across the world. Using Fanon’s incisive analytical abilities to expose the consequences of colonialism on the psyches of colonized peoples, it is both a crucial text in post-colonial theory, and a lesson in the power of analytical skills to reveal the realities that hide beneath the surface of things.  
Fanon was himself part of a colonized nation – Martinique – and grew up with the values and beliefs of French culture imposed upon him, while remaining relegated to an inferior status in society. Qualifying as a psychiatrist in France before working in Algeria (a French colony subject to brutal repression), his own experiences granted him a sharp insight into the psychological problems associated with colonial rule.  
Like any good analytical thinker, Fanon’s particular skill was in breaking things down and joining dots. His analysis of colonial rule exposed its implicit assumptions – and how they were replicated in colonised populations – allowing Fanon to unpick the hidden reasons behind his own conflicted psychological make up, and those of his patients. Unflinchingly clear-sighted in doing so, Black Skin White Masks remains a shocking read today.

An Analysis of Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks

Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism

A number of competing reasons have been advanced for this divergence of findings Since standardized test scores and earnings are two distinct outcomes, school quality may simply have different impacts on the two outcome measures; earnings studies are frequently argued to have insufficient controls for family background variables, the effects of local labor market conditions, and self-selection effects present in samples; and earnings studies and school achievement studies tend to employ different types of data, with earnings studies tending to rely on historical information and school achievement studies on contemporaneous data The last of these reasons for divergent results between earnings and standardized test score studies is potentially important in pointing to the significance of lags in the impact of schooling inputs on outputs 2 This article furthers understanding of the link between inputs and outputs of the educational production process In contrast to earlier studies, our article employs time-series data in order to investigate the link between educational inputs and outputs and does so over a relatively long time run, from 1910 to 1993 Strong results emerge from our analysis We find that educational inputs matter in the determination of educational outputs in the case of South Africa

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/345575

Production of Educational Output: Time‐Series Evidence from Socioeconomically Heterogeneous Populations—the Case of South Africa, 1927–1993*

This paper presents an analysis of the interaction of human capital investment and the development of social and political institutions. We find that human capital matters?for growth through its quality dimension; for distributional conflict by rais ing political aspirations. But human capital does not stand alone either. The level of economic development (output) matters, distributional (instability) conflict as well as the rights dispensation can come to influence human capital investment decisions in their own right. Social, human capital, political as well as economic dimensions are densely interwoven in webs of association.

Does human capital generate social and institutional capital? Exploring evidence from South African time series data

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyse long‐term trends in the development of Africa's economic infrastructure.Design/methodology/approach – The importance of infrastructure was examined in social and economic processes, followed by an exploration of the changing nature of infrastructure and its implications for delivery. The paper looked at the development of infrastructure in Africa by focusing on what was inherited at independence versus what had been achieved there since and why this was the case.Findings – The development challenges are immense because delivery of infrastructure requires much more than financial resources – it requires the capacity to deliver massive, complex projects in an efficient manner. It is clear that African states do not possess this level of capacity but this can still be delivered through innovative public‐private partnerships, global cooperation, and the support of international institutions.Practical implications – Improving Africa's infrastructure is a necess...

Infrastructure investment and its performance in Africa over the course of the twentieth century

The paper examines the association between variouscrime series for South Africa and their economicdeterminants between 1960 and 1993. The study usesJohansen cointegration techniques to establish theimportance of income per capita (economicopportunities), police officers per capita, convictionrates (both of which proxy for the likelihood ofcriminal success whilst the latter also captures aninstitutional efficiency aspect), and politicalinstability (necessary to reflect the unique SouthAfrican environment during this time) on per capitacrime levels. The results caution previous studiesthat find a close relationship between the level ofeconomic activity and recorded crime. Previous workhas relied on the Engle-Granger technique assuming aunique cointegrating vector. Our results for SouthAfrica indicate that whilst total offences arenegatively associated with income per capita,disaggregated crime series do not always yieldcointegrating vectors. Some conclusions on the policyimplications also follow.

https://www.econrsa.org/system/files/publications/policy_papers_interest/pp12_interest.pdf

Temporal Association, the Dynamics of Crime, and their Economic Determinants: A Time Series Econometric Model of South Africa

This paper presents time series on South African tertiary education. The data series presented cover inputs and outputs for the university, technical training and teacher training systems. Modern growth theory has emphasised the importance of human capital, though empirical studies have attempted to isolate human capital impacts through single aggregate measures that capture only a quantity of human capital dimension. While data analysis in the present study is exploratory in nature, we show that strong quality differentials exist both within and between different parts of the tertiary education system. The methodological implication for growth studies is that fully accounting for both the quantity and quality of human capital in aggregate human capital measures thus faces significant measurement difficulties. The data also establish that discrimination in the South African tertiary education was not simply a question of underresourcing of Black institutions. Quality of output was low, but attaining it was frequently very expensive. Copyright 2003, Oxford University Press.

John M. Luiz

Papers

Production of Educational Output: Time‐Series Evidence from Socioeconomically Heterogeneous Populations—the Case of South Africa, 1927–1993*

Does human capital generate social and institutional capital? Exploring evidence from South African time series data

Infrastructure investment and its performance in Africa over the course of the twentieth century

Temporal Association, the Dynamics of Crime, and their Economic Determinants: A Time Series Econometric Model of South Africa

Capstone or deadweight? Inefficiency, duplication and inequity in South Africa's tertiary education system, 1910–93