The Economics of Skills Obsolescence (Research in Labor Economics)

Book Description

Increasingly policy makers are focusing on the importance of skills and lifelong learning. The reason for this is that workers with sufficient and up-to-date skills are more productive and have more potential to remain employed. However, the processes that influence skill obsolescence, have largely been neglected in labor economics.

It was in the 1990s that skill issues came to the top of the agenda, because of the general awareness of the rapid technological developments that affect the demand for human capital. Although the analysis of skill-biased technological change is at the heart of this debate, in recent years, the literature has become wider than simple consideration of this aspect and has started to embrace other causes of obsolescence.

The papers in this volume are selected from the papers presented at a conference on Understanding Skills Obsolescence. They advance both the theoretical and empirical understanding of the causes and the effects of skills obsolescence.

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Human capital growth and destruction: the effect of fertility on skill obsolescence [An article from: Economic Modelling]
P. Alders
Manufacturer: Elsevier
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital
ASIN: B000RR3S5K

Book Description

This digital document is a journal article from Economic Modelling, published by Elsevier in 2005. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
This paper investigates the effect of exogenous fertility shocks on physical- and human capital accumulation in an Overlapping Generation (OLG) framework. Negative shocks in fertility cause a relative scarcity in the future labor market and stimulate human capital accumulation. In turn, this allows the introduction of new technologies at a faster rate, thereby accelerating the obsolescence of the human capital held by older workers who become less employable. The model can thus explain why, after a period of declining fertility, labor market participation of older workers slumped.

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It worked well for me!

Funding Your Future: The Only Guide to Mutual Funds You'll Ever Need
Jonathan Clements
Manufacturer: Grand Central Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0446394963

Book Description

Everyone's worried. Traditionally safe investments in savings, money-market accounts, CDs, and bonds just aren't paying off. Millions of Americans are flocking to mutual funds. Now, award-winning journalist Jonathan Clements clears a path through the financial minefields. In clear, easy-to-understand, jargon-free language, he shows even the most uninformed investor how to use his unique, carefully designed, and balanced approach to mutual funds--and take advantage of the wealth-building power of the stock market.

Customer Reviews:

It worked well for me!.......1998-12-23

I bought this book when I started my first pharmacist job. All my investments are mutual funds and this is the only book I ever read on mutual funds. According to Quicken my ROI today is ranging 23-33%. I'm happy with what the book taught me.

Book Description

View the Table of Contents. Read the Introduction.

”It addresses a powerful topic. It is a conceptually creative piece of scholarship, forged from a sophisticated interdisciplinary viewpoint.”
— The Law and Politics Book Review

"A rich and exceptionally clear account of the meaning-making context and constitution of citizenship."
—Christine Harrington, Institute for Law and Society, New York University

"Mark Weiner provides a rare and radical insight into the racial structures of American law. Reading this racial history through the rhetoric of case law decisions--juridical racialism--provides a dramatic sense of the anthropological scope of what law has done and potentially continues to do."
—Peter Goodrich, Cardozo School of Law

"An enthralling mixture of personages and cases that reveals much about the intimate combining of law and 'American' imperialism, including the complicities of scholarship."
—Peter Fitzpatrick, Birkbeck School of Law, University of London

"Juridical racialism is legal rhetoric infused with Anglo-Saxon racial superiority and Weiner shows how it operated from the Gilded Age to the decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Reading the news, one wonders if it is not still operating today."
—John Brigham, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Americans Without Law shows how the racial boundaries of civic life are based on widespread perceptions about the relative capacity of minority groups for legal behavior, which Mark S. Weiner calls "juridical racialism." The book follows the history of this civic discourse by examining the legal status of four minority groups in four successive historical periods: American Indians in the 1880s, Filipinos after the Spanish-American War, Japanese immigrants in the 1920s, and African Americans in the 1940s and 1950s.

Weiner reveals the significance of juridical racialism for each group—and, in turn, Americans as a whole—by examining the work of anthropological social scientists who developed distinctive ways of understanding racial and legal identity, and through decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court that put these ethno-legal views into practice. Combining history, anthropology, and legal analysis, the book argues that the story of juridical racialism shows how race and citizenship served as a nexus for the professionalization of the social sciences, the growth of national state power, economic modernization, and modern practices of the self.

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The Legal Boundaries of Citizenship Revisited.......2006-11-10

Thousands of ambitious pre-law students all across America received their LSAT scores online this past weekend. This score, ranging from 120 to 180, can make or break a student's admission to a top tier law school. In this sense, entrance into the realm of law school and the comprehension of the complex legal system appears to be technical and defined by arbitrary numerical values.
However, it remains to be seen that the complexity and breadth of information encompassed by the American legal system is unparalleled. It has without question served as the foundation and birthplace of some of the most influential and powerful changes in the course of American history.
Today, it seems that the legal system is once again a battleground for some of the most challenging cases that America has ever seen. As we clash against chronically controversial issues such as immigration and affirmative action (two of the political issues most firmly rooted in culture, history, and race), we must not only remain receptive to the legal history, but to the anthropology intertwined in its midst as well.
Mark Weiner further explores this idea in his book Americans Without Law. Weiner focuses his discourse on the influence of anthropology in shaping the legal boundaries of race and citizenship. He is a firm a believer in the power of anthropology to "shed light on the history of American law not simply to the extent that the judiciary has relied factually on anthropology in its rulings, but also iterated patterns in legal doctrine concerning American citizenship." (109) He uses this perspective to explore the history of juridical racialism, a term used to define the relative capacity of minority groups for legal behavior, as it shaped the lives of Native Americans in the 1880s, Puerto Ricans and Filipinos in the 1900s, Asian immigrants in the 1920s, and black Americans in the 1940s and 1950s.
Weiner recognizes anthropology's central role in not only influencing but also reciprocating the legal system's influence throughout the course of history. The legal boundaries of American race and identity have not been defined by various dynamic shifts in law discourse, but rather have been shaped by popular anthropological thought. 18th century legal thought had categorized culture as race made manifest, spreading an unspoken view that the social and cultural characteristics of human groups were manifestations of an essential part of their collective being, frequently of a set of in-born and inherited characteristics. These notions of a genetically infused disposition for a so-called "lawfulness" were unchallenged for the greater part of American history, and remained so until the birth of the movement of modern anthropology. Meanwhile, these fallible definitions of law were influencing the life experiences of a variety of racial groups throughout the world.
One of the unfortunate consequences of this dynamism in racial law discourse has been the ruthless exercise of plenary power over the territories of Puerto Rico and particularly the Philippines. Weiner argues that the conquered peoples of these nations were considered outside the boundaries of citizenship defined by Teutonic juridical racialism, which stated that Anglo-Saxons were the sole peoples that possessed the capacity for state-building and in essence the only qualifiers of the genetically rooted ability to govern civilization. For people like Daniel Garrison Briton, former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and an advent opponent of Franz Boa's theories of race and cultural relativism, peoples without law were peoples outside America, forever alien and apart (64).
This definition deemed Filipinos as not only lacking the "self-restraint" necessary for complete political freedom, but also lacking of "certain principles of natural justice inherent in the Anglo-Saxon character." Hence, these nations were regarded as lacking an ability to self-govern, and a Supreme Court ruling deemed the United States government as the sovereign power of the Philippines (76). Just as Spain had done so previously, the United States emerged as an imperial power exerting violence, even tyranny, against forces of national political liberation (77). American atrocities of rape, the burning of villages, the indiscriminate murder of civilians and other forms of cruelty were masked by this veneer of legalistic paternalism. Essentially, as the national administrative capacities expanded under a broad reading of Congressional power, juridical racialism hid the injustices and the human price of a bold new American era (80).
While this bygone case seems anachronistic in today's modern world, its influence is reemerging in the contemporary concerns about the immigration debate and the war on terrorism. In an era where the salience of politics of race and identity has reemerged to the forefront, we must navigate through these complex notions of citizenship cautiously. We must not forget that our nation's reluctance to accept an inclusive definition of citizenship has left innumerous scars on the history of a variety of American peoples.
The nation is a ripe political battleground, and the newfound debate over illegal immigration lies at the vanguard. The United States judicial system and the multitudes of Washington policy makers and politicians face the dilemma of juggling the scripted definitions of US citizenship with the social realities of illegal immigrants' influence in the economic, political, and social realms of our nation. Weiner reminds us that despite the passionate arguments of ardently anti-immigration officials such as Pat Buchanan, we must not be coerced back into the simple-minded judgments of a racialized citizenry. Fair and comprehensive immigration reform can be accomplished without the use of scare-tactics and discriminatory practices. Our nation can do better.
Though Weiner makes a fine attempt at pursuing the intersection of law with anthropology, but his deficiencies in a field outside his expertise must also be recognized. His devotion to the cultural relativism ideology of Franz Boas, the German anthropologist who is credited as the "Father of American Anthropology," is at times unintentionally misleading. He fails to address the shortcomings of Boaz, and by not offering any criticism of his ideology, seemingly places Boaz on a moral pedestal. As a result, Weiner forms a dichotomous and antagonistic relationship between the two opposing camps of juridical racialism. In reality, the lines delineating anthropology and law have been much more blurred by conflicting notions of race and identity. Both entities have shared a much more convoluted and complicated history.
Perhaps Weiner's greatest contribution to this scholarship is in his assertion of American law as a shifting yet blanketing force that serves as a "morally integrative force that holds complex societies together through its expression and formation of collective values" (7). The law's roots lie deeper than that which exists within the legal realm, and his recognition of the influence of economic, social, and anthropologically rooted factors offer a fresh and necessary reexamination of the racial boundaries of citizenship. Americans Without Law deserves a place on every good progressive's bookshelf.

An Anthropological Explanation for Changes in Legal Doctrine.......2006-10-27

If the American constitution is only amended infrequently, why do the legal interpretations of it vary so much? Looking at judicial decisions over this country's history, the same constitutional lines have justified seemingly opposing decisions at different times. Mark Weiner's goal in Americans without Law: The Racial Boundaries of Citizenship is to explain just how that is possible. He claims that we can best understand these changes in American judicial doctrine through "an interdisciplinary historical framework, in particular one whose methods are influenced ... by modern cultural anthropology and literary theory." (16) His work demonstrates how variation in intellectual thought shaped American legal history, showing that changes in academic realms brought about parallel ones in legal interpretations.
Weiner's qualifications to undertake such a project come from his own academic history and prior research. He wrote an earlier book on the intersections of race and law, titled Black Trials: Citizenship from the Beginnings of Slavery to the End of Caste and graduated with both a Ph.D. in American Studies and a J.D. from Yale. In Americans without Law, he introduces the idea of juridical racialism, which he says "fused the concepts of race and law into a single idea--in which the two concepts were mutually constitutive." (1) His analysis of it follows how anthropological definitions of race influenced legal history, while also identifying the real world implications of these racially inspired legal decisions.
The interdisciplinary nature of this effort emerges as this book's strength. Weiner maintains that "the relationship of juridical racialism to law and the social sciences, like the relations of law and social science to each other, is that of a complex, repeated pattern." (20) His narration of the analogous histories of anthropological thought and judicial decisions--through this concept of juridical racialism--clearly displays this inescapable relationship between the two that perceptibly evolves over time. These evident parallels and patterns help the reader understand developments in legal interpretations without requiring extensive legal or anthropological knowledge.
After outlining his theories and procedures in a dense introduction, Weiner's chronological case studies effectively analyze the developments in America's legal system between the 1880s and 1950s. He begins with anthropologist John Wesley Powell, who applied a developmentalist theory to ethnographic studies of Native American cultures. Central to this belief was the idea that all societies passed through the same stages of development that were marked by certain characteristics, "the most important of which was [the culture's] conception of property and the rules governing its use and inheritance." (32) This developmentalist idea held that American concepts of individual land ownership represented the highest possible form and pointed to Native American communal land tenure as the central problem for assimilation. These views permeated intellectual and anthropological thought in the 1880s, even infiltrating the judicial branch. For, as Weiner shows, in order to assimilate Native Americans, "the federal judiciary handed down a series of rulings legitimizing this large-scale property redistribution." (49) The reader can conclude that anthropology's developmentalism explains these legal decisions in this instructive initial example of the interwoven history that Weiner describes.
These parallels continue noticeably through American imperialism at the turn of the 20th Century and anti-immigration policies in the 1920s, up to what Weiner views as the ending point of juridical racialism: the Brown decision in 1954. He identifies this terminal case as resulting from the adoption of "an essentially Boasian view of the centrality of culture to human variation." (107) Starting with Franz Boas' unprecedented rejection of genetic approaches to racial difference, Weiner shows the influence of anthropology on the Brown decision in a number of ways. He begins with Gunnar Myrdal's anthropological study of America, which concludes that race does not influence the ability to adhere to American laws. This succeeded in "breaking the strict association of law with racial essence that inhered in earlier forms of juridical racialism and replacing it with a strong association between law and national citizenship that transcended race." (118). Not only does this help explain the Supreme Court's modified interpretation of a static Constitution that ended the era of separate but equal, but the Court even used anthropology in its decision, citing Kenneth Clark's doll-based study of racial prejudice. (126) Weiner's analysis here, while not extremely convincing in its contention that race and law are no longer so tightly connected, comes full circle with this resonating depiction of a monumental shift in anthropology corresponding to one of equal size in the legal system.
Though his portrayal of the tightly linked histories alone is a significant academic contribution, the impact of these legal decisions on American economic and political systems makes his book even more powerful. For example, he displays how the legal system bridged Henry Cabot Lodge's Teutonic juridical racialism, which claimed that Anglo-Saxons were genetically predisposed to be lawful people, and Congress' establishment of plenary power in American colonies following the Spanish-American War. The Supreme Court's Teutonic juridical racial characterization that Americans governing colonies "would necessarily be restrained by the innate ideals they carried in their blood," (76) created a hands-off structure that permitted economic exploitation under unnecessarily violent colonial regimes. Weiner's suggestion here, that "juridical racialism hid the human price of the bold new American era," (80) shows the depth of his interdisciplinary analysis, through this revelation of real world results. He sees these legal decisions as paving the way for consequent courses of action, which further cements the importance of his overall analysis, by indicating the power held by academic thought even outside of the legal realm.
In the end, Weiner's book simultaneously lends credence to and draws its relevance from Gunnar Myrdal's belief that the American "social world was jurisprudential at its core." (117) He explains this argument with his careful analysis of how the legal tradition mirrored changes in anthropological understandings of social concepts. Because of the strength of this connection, the reader, like Myrdal, will come to find the relationship between social science and law to be a meaningful one, through their long, continuous shared history and the legal translation of these anthropological ideas into significant actions.

Book Description

Taking Stock describes the crisis of genetic erosion within the livestock species of North America. Coverage includes an overview of the continuing importance of genetic diversity among the livestock on which humans depend, results of the 1990-1992 North America Livestock Census, histories of some of the rarest breeds of livestock, discussion of extinct breeds and feral populations, and recommendations for conserving genetic diversity in livestock species. Taking Stock calls for changes in practice and policy that will provide for sustainable agriculture in the future.

Taking Stock: The North American Livestock Census. (book reviews): An article from: Countryside & Small Stock Journal

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Taking Stock: The North American Livestock Census. (book reviews): An article from: Countryside & Small Stock Journal
Kimberly Thimmig
Manufacturer: Countryside Publications Ltd.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital
ASIN: B00093MX08
Release Date: 2005-07-28

Book Description

This digital document is an article from Countryside & Small Stock Journal, published by Countryside Publications Ltd. on July 1, 1995. The length of the article is 601 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Taking Stock: The North American Livestock Census. (book reviews)
Author: Kimberly Thimmig
Publication: Countryside & Small Stock Journal (Magazine/Journal)
Date: July 1, 1995
Publisher: Countryside Publications Ltd.
Volume: v79 Issue: n4 Page: p44(1)

Article Type: Book Review

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Taking Stock: The North American Livestock Census. (book reviews): An article from: Countryside & Small Stock Journal
Jan Palmer
Manufacturer: Countryside Publications Ltd.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital
ASIN: B00096NGNS
Release Date: 2005-06-01

Book Description

This digital document is an article from Countryside & Small Stock Journal, published by Countryside Publications Ltd. on November 1, 1996. The length of the article is 337 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Taking Stock: The North American Livestock Census. (book reviews)
Author: Jan Palmer
Publication: Countryside & Small Stock Journal (Magazine/Journal)
Date: November 1, 1996
Publisher: Countryside Publications Ltd.
Volume: v80 Issue: n6 Page: p79(1)

Article Type: Book Review

Distributed by Thomson Gale

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Gaussian Basis Sets for Molecular Calculations (Physical Sciences Data)

Manufacturer: Elsevier Publishing Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General & Reference | Chemistry | Professional Science | Professional & Technical | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 0444422544

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Gaussian basis sets for the atoms H-Ne for use in molecular calculations
Frans Bernard van Duijneveldt
Manufacturer: Available from IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding
ASIN: B00071O2YW

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Polyatomic molecular Dirac-Hartree-Fock calculations with Gaussian basis sets (SuDoc NAS 1.26:187854)
Kenneth G. Dyall
Manufacturer: NASA Ames Research Center
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding
ASIN: B00010E17M

Book Description

The pervasive and unrestrained use of obscenity has long been acknowledged as a major feature of fifth-century Attic Comedy; no other Western art form relies so heavily on the sexual and scatological dimensions of language. This acclaimed book, now in a new edition, offers both a comprehensive discussion of the dynamics of Greek obscenity and a detailed commentary on the terminology itself. After contrasting the peculiar characteristics of the Greek notion of obscenity to modern-day ideas, Henderson discusses obscenity's role in the development of Attic Comedy, its historical origins, varieties, and dramatic function. His analysis of obscene terminology sheds new light on Greek culture, and his discussion of Greek homosexuality offers a refreshing corrective to the idealized Platonic view. He also looks in detail at the part obscenity plays in each of Aristophanes' eleven surviving plays. The latter part of the book identifies all the obscene terminology found in the extant examples of Attic Comedy, both complete plays and fragments. Although these terminological entries are arranged in numbered paragraphs resembling a glossary, they can also be read as independent essays on the various aspects of comic obscenity. Terms are explained as they occur in each individual context and in relation to typologically similar terminology. With newly corrected and updated philological material, this second edition of Maculate Muse will serve as an invaluable reference work for the study of Greek drama.

Customer Reviews:

How to talk dirty in classical Greek!.......2005-03-18

I really enjoyed this book and heartily recommend it for the neophyte student in classical theater studies. Jeffrey Henderson repeats the actual Greek characters for common sexual body parts so often that even the casual reader soon begins to feel like a real classical scholar (or an ancient sailor)!

Scholars have traditionally declined to elucidate, evaluate or even discuss the nature and function of sexual and body function language in Attic Comedy (Attican, or Athenian, new comedy, that lasted throughout the reign of the Macedonian rulers, ending about 260 B.C.) This despite the fact that Aristophanes and his contemporaries wove rich, ribald tapestries of obscene words, allusions, double entendres and bawdy sight gags throughout their works. Classical researcher Jeffrey Henderson, in his The Maculate Muse: Obscene Language in Attic Comedy, attributes this to a notion that obscenity has only peripheral relevance to the actual meaning and value of the plays (they were "attention getters" to win the favor of restless audiences or, conversely, such things were not considered obscene by the Greeks). Fallacious assumptions, says Henderson. The academy's recent embrace of the undeniable accomplishments of solid gay and feminist scholarship in the areas of human sexuality and its expressions has freed researchers in the area of Classic (Old and Middle) comedy to finally acknowledge the integral connection of obscenity to the main themes of the plays, the stage actions, the development of plot and the characterization of personae. To this end, Henderson gives, in The Maculate Muse, what may be the foremost comprehensive attempt to identify and discuss all the extant obscene terminology of Attic comedy and to assess the historical, cultural and literary factors which led to obscenity's focal position in the plays of Aristophanes and others of his day.

The author modestly admits that much more needs to be done. Henderson makes a case for the need for further investigation of, not merely group behavior and relative behavior to societal institutions (like marriage and public events) but also exact sexual behavior (note: this will be difficult if not impossible due to lack of objective documentation...people in every society censor/idealize their private behaviors when representing them). This reprint of Jeffrey Henderson's original 1971 dissertation, with new preface, addenda, corrigenda and retractanda, is a "starting point" and a valuable tool for a deeper appreciation of the social context of the Attic comedies.

Despite the current climate of sexual conservatism in America, contemporary theater is still a glorious window into the secular and profane organic and psychosexual forces, hand in hand with intellect and society, which coshape our lives. A sensitive reevaluation of the realistic framework of the 5th century Greek comic writers reveals that the vagaries of sexuality and our attitudes toward it in the arts is an amorphous constant, alternately suppressed and celebrated, but never absent in the text and/or subtext of the theatrical tradition.

The Maculate Muse : Obscene Language in Attic Comedy

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The Maculate Muse : Obscene Language in Attic Comedy
Jeffrey Henderson
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OKOKVG

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The Maculate muse : obscene language in Attic comedy.
Henderson Jeffrey.
Manufacturer: Yale University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OSB1OC

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Maculate Muse: Obscene Language in Attic Comedy
Jeffrey Henderson
Manufacturer: Yale University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000NOX2RG

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The Maculate Muse: Obscene Language in Attic Comedy
Jeffrey Henderson
Manufacturer: Yale University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000KTCH2U

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