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Author: Danny Oppenheimer
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262300958
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
Why democracy is the most effective form of government despite irrational (and sometime oblivious) voters and flawed (and sometimes inept) politicians. Voters often make irrational decisions based on inaccurate and irrelevant information. Politicians are often inept, corrupt, or out of touch with the will of the people. Elections can be determined by the design of the ballot and the gerrymandered borders of a district. And yet, despite voters who choose candidates according to the boxer–brief dichotomy and politicians who struggle to put together a coherent sentence, democracy works exceptionally well: citizens of democracies are healthier, happier, and freer than citizens of other countries. In Democracy Despite Itself, Danny Oppenheimer, a psychologist, and Mike Edwards, a political scientist, explore this paradox: How can democracy lead to such successful outcomes when the defining characteristic of democracy—elections—is so flawed? Oppenheimer and Edwards argue that democracy works because regular elections, no matter how flawed, produce a variety of unintuitive, positive consequences. The brilliance of democracy, write Oppenheimer and Edwards, does not lie in the people's ability to pick superior leaders. It lies in the many ways that it subtly encourages the flawed people and their flawed leaders to work toward building a better society.
Author: Danny Oppenheimer
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262300958
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257
Get Book Here
Book Description
Why democracy is the most effective form of government despite irrational (and sometime oblivious) voters and flawed (and sometimes inept) politicians. Voters often make irrational decisions based on inaccurate and irrelevant information. Politicians are often inept, corrupt, or out of touch with the will of the people. Elections can be determined by the design of the ballot and the gerrymandered borders of a district. And yet, despite voters who choose candidates according to the boxer–brief dichotomy and politicians who struggle to put together a coherent sentence, democracy works exceptionally well: citizens of democracies are healthier, happier, and freer than citizens of other countries. In Democracy Despite Itself, Danny Oppenheimer, a psychologist, and Mike Edwards, a political scientist, explore this paradox: How can democracy lead to such successful outcomes when the defining characteristic of democracy—elections—is so flawed? Oppenheimer and Edwards argue that democracy works because regular elections, no matter how flawed, produce a variety of unintuitive, positive consequences. The brilliance of democracy, write Oppenheimer and Edwards, does not lie in the people's ability to pick superior leaders. It lies in the many ways that it subtly encourages the flawed people and their flawed leaders to work toward building a better society.
Author: Clinton Heylin
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
ISBN: 1569764220
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 418
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Book Description
Revealing the facts rather than the myths behind Orson Welles's Hollywood career, this groundbreaking history fills in the gaps behind the drama of one of the most well-known American filmmakers.
Author:
Publisher: DIANE Publishing
ISBN: 1428948945
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 64
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Book Description
In recent years, airline flight delays have been among the most vexing problems in the national transportation system. They reached unprecedented levels in 2000, when one flight in four was delayed. Although bad weather has historically been the main cause of delays, a growing reason has been the inability of the nations air transport system to efficiently absorb all of the aircraft trying to use limited airspace or trying to take off or land at busy airports. Recent events most notably the terrorist attacks on buildings in New York City and Washington, D.C., using hijacked airliners, and the economic slowdown that preceded these attacks have changed the extent of the delay problem, at least for the short term. With many airlines cutting their flights by 20 percent or more, the air transport system is having less difficulty absorbing the volume of flights. Whether the volume of flights will continue at these lowered levels is unknown. However, it is likely that a more robust economy and less public apprehension about flying will lead to renewed demands on the air transport system. If so, concerns about delays and the actions being taken to address them may once again command national attention.
Author: Amanda E. Lewis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190250879
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
On the surface, Riverview High School looks like the post-racial ideal. Serving an enviably affluent, diverse, and liberal district, the school is well-funded, its teachers are well-trained, and many of its students are high achieving. Yet Riverview has not escaped the same unrelenting question that plagues schools throughout America: why is it that even when all of the circumstances seem right, black and Latino students continue to lag behind their peers? Through five years' worth of interviews and data-gathering at Riverview, John Diamond and Amanda Lewis have created a rich and disturbing portrait of the achievement gap that persists more than fifty years after the formal dismantling of segregation. As students progress from elementary school to middle school to high school, their level of academic achievement increasingly tracks along racial lines, with white and Asian students maintaining higher GPAs and standardized testing scores, taking more advanced classes, and attaining better college admission results than their black and Latino counterparts. Most research to date has focused on the role of poverty, family stability, and other external influences in explaining poor performance at school, especially in urban contexts. Diamond and Lewis instead situate their research in a suburban school, and look at what factors within the school itself could be causing the disparity. Most crucially, they challenge many common explanations of the 'racial achievement gap,' exploring what race actually means in this situation, and why it matters. An in-depth study with far-reaching consequences, Despite the Best Intentions revolutionizes our understanding of both the knotty problem of academic disparities and the larger question of the color line in American society.
Author: Botakoz Kassymbekova
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822981475
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 263
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Book Description
Despite Cultures examines the strategies and realities of the Soviet state-building project in Tajikistan during the 1920s and 1930s. Based on extensive archival research, Botakoz Kassymbekova analyzes the tactics of Soviet officials at the center and periphery that produced, imitated, and improvised governance in this Soviet southern borderland and in Central Asia more generally. She shows how the tools of violence, intimidation, and coercion were employed by Muslim and European Soviet officials alike to implement Soviet versions of modernization and industrialization. In a region marked by ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity, the Soviet plan was to recognize these differences while subsuming them within the conglomerate of official Soviet culture. As Kassymbekova reveals, the local ruling system was built upon an intricate network of individuals, whose stated loyalty to communism was monitored through a chain of command that stretched from Moscow through Tashkent to Dushanbe/Stalinabad. The system was tenuously based on individual leaders who struggled to decipher the language of Bolshevism and maintain power through violent repression.
Author: Nortin M. Hadler
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773572252
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 324
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Book Description
Hadler systematically builds the case that many medical interventions are hazardous to our health. Especially insidious is the misuse of longevity statistics in turning the difficulties experienced through a natural course of life, such as aging and osteoporosis, into illnesses. He argues that unfounded assertions and flagrant marketing have led to the medicalization of everyday life and he offers practical solutions on such topics as aging, obesity, adult onset diabetes, and back problems. In The Last Well Person Hadler addresses the tough questions about our health care, cutting through the medical white noise.
Author: Thomas W. Dichter
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
For more than thirty-five years, Thomas W. Dichter has worked in the field of international development, managing and evaluating projects for nongovernmental organizations, directing a Peace Corps country program, and serving as a consultant for such agencies as USAID, UNDP, and the World Bank. On the basis of this extensive and varied experience, he has become an outspoken critic of what he terms the "international poverty alleviation industry." He believes that efforts to reduce world poverty have been well-intentioned but largely ineffective. On the whole, the development industry has failed to serve the needs of the people it has sought to help. To make his case, Dichter reviews the major trends in development assistance from the 1960s through the 1990s, illustrating his analysis with eighteen short stories based on his own experiences in the field. The analytic chapters are thus grounded in the daily life of development workers as described in the stories. Dichter shows how development organizations have often become caught up in their own self-perpetuation and in public relations efforts designed to create an illusion of effectiveness. Tracing the evolution of the role of money (as opposed to ideas) in development assistance, he suggests how financial imperatives have reinforced the tendency to sponsor time-bound projects, creating a dependency among aid recipients. He also examines the rise of careerism and increased bureaucratization in the industry, arguing that assistance efforts have become disconnected from important lessons learned on the ground. In the end, Dichter calls for a more light-handed and artful approach to development assistance, with fewer agencies andexperts involved. His stance is pragmatic, rather than ideological or political. What matters, he says, is what works, and the current practices of the development industry are simply not effective.
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Delegated legislation
Languages : en
Pages : 524
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Book Description
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business
Languages : en
Pages : 688
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Book Description
Author: Franco Ferrari
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004502920
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 464
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Book Description
According to some commentators, forum shopping is an “evil” that must be eradicated. It has been suggested that the unification of substantive law through international conventions constitutes one way to achieve this outcome. This book shows that the drafting of uniform substantive law convention cannot prevent forum shopping. The reasons are classified into two main categories: convention-extrinsic and convention-intrinsic reasons. The former category comprises those reasons upon which uniform substantive law conventions do not have an impact at all. These reasons range from the costs of access to justice to the bias of potential adjudicators to the enforceability of judgments. The convention-intrinsic reasons, on the other hand, are reasons that relate to the nature and design of uniform substantive law conventions, and include their limited substantive and international spheres of application as well as their limited scope of application, the need to provide for reservations, etc. This book also focuses on another reason why forum shopping cannot be overcome: the impossibility of ensuring uniform applications and interpretations of the various uniform substantive law conventions.
