Why did rural areas recover from the great recession much more slowly than metropolitan areas? Due to declining tax revenues and intergovernmental aid, employment in the American local government sector fell substantially after the great recession. Cuts to local public employment were especially large, long-lasting and consequential in rural areas, which have become relatively dependent on public-sector employment and intergovernmental transfers. The public sector is relatively inconsequential in urban America, but in many rural places, a decade after the great recession, the public sector was the slowest category of employment to recover and the leading source of long-term job losses.
The central Mediterranean today marks one of the most active and dangerous routes for sea crossings to Europe, due in no small part to border regimes designed to prevent the mobilities that have defined these waters from earliest antiquity. This article considers initial results of fieldwork undertaken to document and make visible the material culture of contemporary vessels used to carry forced and undocumented migrants to southeast Sicily over the past decade. These former fishing craft reveal structural and spatial adaptations to facilitate a different traffic, reflected also in items left behind when the boats were intercepted. Archaeology helps to embed these journeys within long-term frameworks of connectivity and to situate their ephemeral traces alongside more traditional notions of Mediterranean maritime heritage. In a region that celebrates its deep connections to the sea, care for the materiality of these contemporary mobilities foregrounds human experiences, while serving goals of advocacy, empowerment, and social justice amid global change.
Is democracy in trouble, perhaps even dying? Pundits say so, and polls show that most Americans believe that their country’s system of governance is being “tested” or is “under attack.” But is the future of democracy necessarily so dire? In The Civic Bargain, Brook Manville and Josiah Ober push back against the prevailing pessimism about the fate of democracy around the world. Instead of an epitaph for democracy, they offer a guide for democratic renewal, calling on citizens to recommit to a “civic bargain” with one another to guarantee civic rights of freedom, equality, and dignity. That bargain also requires them to fulfill the duties of democratic citizenship: governing themselves with no “boss” except one another, embracing compromise, treating each other as civic friends, and investing in civic education for each rising generation.
Manville and Ober trace the long progression toward self-government through four key moments in democracy’s history: Classical Athens, Republican Rome, Great Britain’s constitutional monarchy, and America’s founding. Comparing what worked and what failed in each case, they draw out lessons for how modern democracies can survive and thrive. Manville and Ober show that democracy isn’t about getting everything we want; it’s about agreeing on a shared framework for pursuing our often conflicting aims. Crucially, citizens need to be able to compromise, and must not treat one another as political enemies. And we must accept imperfection; democracy is never finished but evolves and renews itself continually. As long as the civic bargain is maintained—through deliberation, bargaining, and compromise—democracy will live.
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A powerful case for democracy and how it can adapt and survive—if we want it to
Governments around the world responded to the economic fallout from the COVID pandemic with unprecedented transfers to households and firms, financing these transfers with large fiscal deficits that will have a long-lasting effect on public debt levels.1 During this period, private saving rates rose everywhere, and there were important movements in current accounts, including a notable increase in the US current-account deficit (see fig. 1). In this paper, we ask: To what extent were these changes related? How do fiscal deficits affect the world’s balance of payments in the short and the long run?
Piotr Jabkowski is associate professor of sociology at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan (Poland) and member of the European Social Survey Sampling and Weighting Expert Panel. At the Adam Mickiewicz University, he teaches statistics, advanced quantitative methods and survey methodology to undergraduate and postgraduate students. His research and publications focus on sample quality in cross-country comparative surveys, the total error paradigm and sampling theory.
Mariusz Baranowski, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan (Poland), Faculty of Sociology, Department of Sociology of Social Stratification, and chairman of Sociological Committee within the Poznan Society of Friends of Arts and Sciences. Doctor of Economic Sociology and MA in Sociology (Adam Mickiewicz University), Philosophy (Adam Mickiewicz University) and postgraduate diploma in Human Resource Management (Economic Development Agency).
Baranowski's research work is focused on economic sociology, social inequality, welfare state and environmental issues.
We show that, in a broad class of menu cost models, the first-order dynamics of aggregate inflation in response to arbitrary shocks to aggregate costs are nearly the same as in Calvo models with suitably chosen Calvo adjustment frequencies. We first prove that the canonical menu cost model is first-order equivalent to a mixture of two time-dependent models, which reflect the extensive and intensive margins of price adjustment. We then show numerically that, in any plausible parameterization, this mixture is well-approximated by a single Calvo model. This close numerical fit carries over to other standard specifications of menu cost models. Thus, for shocks that are not too large, the Phillips curve for a menu cost model looks like the New Keynesian Phillips curve, but with a higher slope.
We propose a general and highly efficient method for solving and estimating general equilibrium heterogeneous-agent models with aggregate shocks in discrete time. Our approach relies on the rapid computation of sequence-space Jacobians—the derivatives of perfect-foresight equilibrium mappings between aggregate sequences around the steady state. Our main contribution is a fast algorithm for calculating Jacobians for a large class of heterogeneous-agent problems. We combine this algorithm with a systematic approach to composing and inverting Jacobians to solve for general equilibrium impulse responses. We obtain a rapid procedure for likelihood-based estimation and computation of nonlinear perfect-foresight transitions. We apply our methods to three canonical heterogeneous-agent models: a neoclassical model, a New Keynesian model with one asset, and a New Keynesian model with two assets.
Johanna Schenner is a senior post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Vienna, Austria. In her research she is investigating employment conditions of farmworkers.
Based on past and current ethnographic research in the Parisian metropolitan region, I discuss how racial and ethnic minorities understand and respond to their racialization in a context in which race and ethnicity are not legitimate or acknowledged, and how a suspect citizenship is created. I will discuss how racial and ethnic minorities are “citizen outsiders” as evident of France’s “racial project” (Omi and Winant 1994), which marks distinctions outside of explicit categorization. I explore not only how race marks individuals outside of formal categories, but also how people respond to these distinctions in terms of a racism-related issue, here, police violence and brutality against racial and ethnic minorities. I will also discuss how activists frame their growing social problem given the constraints of French Republican ideology.
Jean Beaman is Associate Professor of Sociology, with affiliations with Political Science, Feminist Studies, Global Studies, and the Center for Black Studies Research, at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Previously, she was faculty at Purdue University and held visiting fellowships at Duke University and the European University Institute (Florence, Italy). Her research is ethnographic in nature and focuses on race/ethnicity, racism, international migration, and state-sponsored violence in both France and the United States. She is author of Citizen Outsider: Children of North African Immigrants in France (University of California Press, 2017), as well as numerous articles and book chapters. Her current book project is on suspect citizenship and belonging, anti-racist mobilization, and activism against police violence in France. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Northwestern University. She is also an Editor of H-Net Black Europe, an Associate Editor of the journal, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, and Corresponding Editor for the journal Metropolitics/Metropolitiques.
