Politics, Institutions, and Diversified Business Groups

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Ross Schneider ◽  
Asli M. Colpan ◽  
Weihuang Wong
Keyword(s):  
Private Equity ◽  
National Level ◽  
Business Groups ◽  
The United States ◽  
Resource Theory ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Concentrated Ownership ◽  
The Past ◽  
Power Resource Theory

This chapter examines the effects of national level politics and institutions on the long-term evolution of diversified business groups. A central goal of this chapter is to connect the analysis of business groups to broader debates on the political economy of advanced capitalism, especially varieties of capitalism, power resource theory, legal families, and entrenchment. States (through regulations) and firms (via their corporate practices, especially concentrated ownership and cross-ownership) across much of continental Europe and Japan protected business groups by forestalling takeovers, while capital markets in liberal economies encouraged the formation of new kinds of business groups (especially private equity) by facilitating takeovers. Brief summaries of the evolution of business groups over the past century in Sweden and the United States illustrate these different dynamics in coordinated and liberal economies.

scholarly journals STATEMENT FROM THE DIRECTOR OF THE W. E. B. DU BOIS INSTITUTE

2004 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Louis Gates
Keyword(s):  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Color Line ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
The Past ◽  
Considerable Work ◽  
Public Policy Decisions

In 1903, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois famously predicted that the problem of the twentieth century would be the problem of the color line. Indeed, during the past century, matters of race were frequently the cause of intense conflict and the stimulus for public policy decisions not only in the United States, but throughout the world. The founding of the Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race at the beginning of the twenty-first century acknowledges the continuing impact of Du Bois's prophecy, his pioneering role as one of the founders of the discipline of sociology in the American academy, and the considerable work that remains to be done as we confront the “problem” that Du Bois identified over a century ago.

The Flynn Effect

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Duckworth ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Graduate School ◽  
The United States ◽  
Delay Of Gratification ◽  
Average Score ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
Abstract Reasoning ◽  
Flynn Effect ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Difference

In tandem with increases in delay of gratification, the human capacity for abstract reasoning has increased enormously over the past century. This phenomenon is called the Flynn Effect, after the political scientist who discovered it. I first learned about the Flynn Effect in graduate school. I remember thinking it was impossible. How could it be that as a species, we're getting smarter? And not just a little bit smarter. The size of the Flynn Effect is staggering: more than 30 IQ points—the difference between getting an average score on a standard intelligence test versus qualifying as mentally gifted. Gains are comparable in all areas of the United States and, indeed, around the world.

DIPHTHERIA IN THE UNITED STATES, 1959-1960

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1962 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 194-205
Author(s):  
Theodore C. Doege ◽  
Clark W. Heath ◽  
Ida L. Sherman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Communicable Disease ◽  
Case Fatality ◽  
The United States ◽  
Surveillance Data ◽  
Term Trend ◽  
The Past ◽  
Primary Series ◽  
Long Term Trend

Diphtheria attack rates and cases, and to a much lesser extent case-fatality rates, have fallen steadily within the United States during the past 25 years. However, during 1959 and 1960 there was a halt in this long-term trend. Epidemiologic data on 868 clinical cases of diphtheria occurring in 1959 and 873 cases in 1960 were submitted to the Communicable Disease Center by 45 states. The cases and several major outbreaks tended to concentrate in the southern and southwestern states. Attack rates and deaths were highest for children under 10 years, and attack rates were more than five times greater for nonwhite children. Analysis of 1960 immunization data shows that 72% of the patients had received no immunizations. Fifty-five per cent of carriers, but only 18% of persons with bacteriologically confirmed cases, had received a primary series. Only 1 person of 58 fatal cases occurring in 1960 had received a primary series. Certain problems for future investigation, disclosed by the surveillance data, are discussed.

How to Get There

2019 ◽  
pp. 202-234
Author(s):  
Lane Kenworthy
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Ethnic Diversity ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Security ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Public Insurance ◽  
The Past ◽  
Government Role ◽  
The Right ◽  
Organized Interest

Abstract: The lesson of the past one hundred years is that as the United States gets richer, we are willing to spend more in order to safeguard against loss and enhance fairness. Advances in social policy come only intermittently, but they do come. And when they come, they usually last. The expansion of public insurance that has occurred over the past century is what we should expect for the future. I consider an array of potential obstacles, including Americans’ dislike of big government, Democrats’ centrism, Democrats’ electoral struggles, the shift to the right in the balance of organized interest group strength, the structure of America’s political system, racial and ethnic diversity, slowing economic growth, and more. None of these is likely to derail America’s slow but steady movement toward an expanded government role in improving economic security, enhancing opportunity, and ensuring decent and rising living standards for all.

scholarly journals Vulnerability due to Nocturnal Tornadoes

2008 ◽  
Vol 23 (5) ◽  
pp. 795-807 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walker S. Ashley ◽  
Andrew J. Krmenec ◽  
Rick Schwantes
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Building Structures ◽  
The Public ◽  
Mobile Homes ◽  
The Past ◽  
High Fatality Rate ◽  
Potential Break ◽  
Tornado Warning ◽  
Dissemination System

Abstract This study investigates the human vulnerability caused by tornadoes that occurred between sunset and sunrise from 1880 to 2007. Nocturnal tornadoes are theorized to enhance vulnerability because they are difficult to spot and occur when the public tends to be asleep and in weak building structures. Results illustrate that the nocturnal tornado death rate over the past century has not shared the same pace of decline as those events transpiring during the daytime. From 1950 to 2005, a mere 27.3% of tornadoes were nocturnal, yet 39.3% of tornado fatalities and 42.1% of killer tornado events occurred at night. Tornadoes during the overnight period (local midnight to sunrise) are 2.5 times as likely to kill as those occurring during the daytime hours. It is argued that a core reason why the national tornado fatality toll has not continued to decrease in the past few decades is due to the vulnerability to these nocturnal events. This vulnerability is magnified when other factors such as escalating mobile (or “manufactured”) home stock and an increasing and spreading population are realized. Unlike other structure types that show no robust demarcation between nocturnal and daytime fatalities, nearly 61% of fatalities in mobile homes take place at night revealing this housing stock’s distinct nocturnal tornado vulnerability. Further, spatial analysis illustrates that the American South’s high nocturnal tornado risk is an important factor leading to the region’s high fatality rate. The investigation emphasizes a potential break in the tornado warning dissemination system utilized currently in the United States.

Near Term Deployment, Long Term Impact: Uranium Price Over the Lifetime of New Capacity

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erich A. Schneider ◽  
Neil Shah
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Price Forecasting ◽  
Current Production ◽  
Ore Grades ◽  
Past Data ◽  
Near Term ◽  
Long Term Impact ◽  
Production Capacities

While reasonable short-term resource price projections can be obtained by taking a bottom-up approach — constructing a supply curve based upon current production capacities and costs — this approach breaks down as the time horizon of the analysis lengthens. One approach to long-term price forecasting is to calibrate a simple model of a commodity market against past data. To that end, an analogy was drawn between the behavior of the uranium market and that of some three dozen materials for which the United States Geologic Survey (USGS) maintains data. This work adds to previously published results showing that the USGS-reported prices of minerals similar to uranium have consistently declined over the past century. In this paper, the extent to which uranium geology and extraction technologies are indeed analogous to other minerals is quantitatively addressed. A study of crustal abundances, ore grades being economically mined, concentration factors, market share of extraction techniques, years of proven reserve and other factors indicates that uranium is not at all exceptional with respect to the average of the USGS minerals. This suggests that, on the supply side, the analogy between the USGS minerals and uranium may indeed offer valuable insights into medium and long term uranium price behavior.

scholarly journals Equity and length of lifespan are not the same

2016 ◽  
Vol 113 (30) ◽  
pp. 8420-8423 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Seligman ◽  
Gabi Greenberg ◽  
Shripad Tuljapurkar
Keyword(s):  
Life Expectancy ◽  
Health Equity ◽  
Causes Of Death ◽  
The United States ◽  
Past Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Mortality Improvement ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Age Of Death

Efforts to understand the dramatic declines in mortality over the past century have focused on life expectancy. However, understanding changes in disparity in age of death is important to understanding mechanisms of mortality improvement and devising policy to promote health equity. We derive a novel decomposition of variance in age of death, a measure of inequality, and apply it to cause-specific contributions to the change in variance among the G7 countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States) from 1950 to 2010. We find that the causes of death that contributed most to declines in the variance are different from those that contributed most to increase in life expectancy; in particular, they affect mortality at younger ages. We also find that, for two leading causes of death [cancers and cardiovascular disease (CVD)], there are no consistent relationships between changes in life expectancy and variance either within countries over time or between countries. These results show that promoting health at younger ages is critical for health equity and that policies to control cancer and CVD may have differing implications for equity.

scholarly journals Two centuries of settlement and urban development in the United States

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (23) ◽  
pp. eaba2937 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Leyk ◽  
Johannes H. Uhl ◽  
Dylan S. Connor ◽  
Anna E. Braswell ◽  
Nathan Mietkiewicz ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Land Use ◽  
Urban Development ◽  
Population Change ◽  
The United States ◽  
Data Availability ◽  
Development Patterns ◽  
The Past ◽  
Resolution Analysis

Over the past 200 years, the population of the United States grew more than 40-fold. The resulting development of the built environment has had a profound impact on the regional economic, demographic, and environmental structure of North America. Unfortunately, constraints on data availability limit opportunities to study long-term development patterns and how population growth relates to land-use change. Using hundreds of millions of property records, we undertake the finest-resolution analysis to date, in space and time, of urbanization patterns from 1810 to 2015. Temporally consistent metrics reveal distinct long-term urban development patterns characterizing processes such as settlement expansion and densification at fine granularity. Furthermore, we demonstrate that these settlement measures are robust proxies for population throughout the record and thus potential surrogates for estimating population changes at fine scales. These new insights and data vastly expand opportunities to study land use, population change, and urbanization over the past two centuries.

From Tent Meetings and Store-front Healing Rooms to Walmarts and the Internet: Healing Spaces in the United States, the Americas, and the World, 1906–2006

2006 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
pp. 631-647 ◽  
Author(s):  
Candy Gunther Brown
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Medical Science ◽  
Spiritual Healing ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Boundaries ◽  
Attractive Alternative ◽  
Past Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Christian Churches ◽  
The World

The centennial of the Azusa Street revivals of 1906 provides us with convenient poles for charting shifts in the landscape of Christian spiritual healing practices during the past century. Alongside unprecedented achievements in medical science, nearly 80 percent of Americans report believing that God supernaturally heals people in answer to prayer. Individuals who need healing, even after trying the best medical cures, readily transgress ecclesiastical, physical, and social boundaries in their quest for health and wholeness. The promise of a tangible experience of divine power, moreover, presents an attractive alternative to seekers disillusioned with what they perceive as the callous materialism of medical science and the religious legalism of traditional Christian churches. This essay calls for new narratives of sacred space that map the ways that pentecostal and charismatic healing practices have proliferated, diversified, and sacralized a growing number and variety of physical, social, and linguistic spaces in the past hundred years. At the turn of the twentieth century, modernist epistemological assumptions that privileged reason over experience encouraged fine intellectual distinctions between the sacred and the secular. In esteeming bodily experience as more trustworthy than disembodied doctrine and in resisting linguistic binaries as culturally constructed, postmodern epistemologies have multiplied the number and range of places available to be endowed with sacred meanings. I argue that boundaries between the sacred and the secular are dissolving at the same time that new boundaries are being established, privileging particular places and defining a new relationship among the United States, the Americas, and the world.

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