Education, Welfare and Economics: A Human Capabilities View

In terms of welfare, the human capabilities approach was developed as a means of measuring the opportunities open to an individual and through that, the welfare of a society. Two of the major authors in the capabilities approach are Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. Popular metrics which gets conflated with the status of a nation’s welfare is that of Gross National Product (GNP) or Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Read more…

The Environmental and Social Costs of Inequality by Benjamin Irvine

In the 10 years to 2008 the top 20% of earners in the North West increased there incomes at roughly double the rate of the bottom 20%, in line with wider UK trends, by 9% compared to 4%. [Jenni Viitanen and Katie Schmuecker, ‘Richer Yet Poorer’, 2011, Institute for Public Policy Research North, Page 6; Retrieved from: http://www.ippr.org/assets/media/images/media/files/publication/2011/05/richer%20yet%20poorer%20Feb2010_1823.pdf]
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The Differences Arise In Group Psychology

The behaviour of the group is enigmatic and group psychology has long been studied to understand certain behaviours. A group acts in our minds as a corporate person in as much as we imagine what the norm is and normalize behaviour to what this imagined person embodies. This gives rise to worrying outcomes in many situations. Throughout history, the madness of crowds has been known to overtake the individual responsibility of thinking and acting according to personal responsibility.
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Rationality and Science: A Social and Environmental Philosophy by Kenneth Wilson

This chapter concerns itself with rationality in its scientific guise. Typically science is often taken to be the paradigm instance of rationality in the modern period. In addition to science being a key representative of reason, it has also become separated from religion, the historical locus of thought about values and ethics.
My concern in this chapter lies in two areas. The first of these lies in the distinction between fact and value, science and ethics, and the second, with the notion that science is ethically neutral. In the discussion of these issues I aim to show that there are confusions and inconsistencies involved which force one to reconsider the status of science and the sense in which it is rational. Indeed I am at pains to counter a tendency which sees scientific facts as somehow determining what our values ought to be, when in actuality scientific facts provide no such solutions. Read more…

The Banking Game: Literature Review Part Two by Doreen Soutar

The Banking Game: Analysis of the extinction of the bank as trusted institution and NONIIs as an indicator of non-reciprocal strategies by Doreen Soutar. This is the second part of her literature review…

Banking: A Dual-Strategy Model

The banking industry operates in two distinct environments: financial trading and retail savings and loans (Casu et al 2006) and this has in the past resulted in the banks developing two distinct behavioural patterns to cope with these environments: a competitive model and a cooperative model. The competitive model was suitable for environments such as the stock market, where the inhabitants agreed to fight each other for available resources. The cooperative model was more suitable for retail banking environment, where customers assume that there is a fundamental principle of honourable group-focused behaviour (King, 2010; Kennedy, 2010). Read more…

Objectivity

The state of being objective is to correctly represent reality. The term “reality” however can lack clarity. Science is a methodological attempt to resolve truths from ambiguity.

Empirical evidence based upon observations and experimentation in the physical world is conducive to the verification of scientific judgments. Adherence to the rules of deduction and the process of inductive reasoning implements the validity and soundness of scientific arguments and conclusions. Read more…

Experiences of Food Poverty: Contents and Bibliography by Samuel Lindskog

Food poverty is the experience of not being able to acquire and eat a sufficient amount and good enough quality of food and entails a loss of self-respect, causes ill-health and has implications for social relations. This qualitative research has captured some of the complexity and pervasive nature of that lived experience, for people in Brighton and Hove.
The analysis of this study locates the cause of food poverty in structural factors “outside the individual’s ability to manipulate information and money” (Dowler 1998:63), such as rising cost of living, diminishing wages and a welfare system that has failed to support participants through times of extreme vulnerability. Read more…