Suchergebnisse

This book explores whether the ideology of communism was doomed to failure due to psychological rather than structural flaws. Does communism fail because there is not enough individual incentive and does it discourage psychological ownership? If so, does it produce learned helplessness and therefore empower evil? This book considers such questions, both with respect to how communism actually functioned and how it could have functioned using examples from Eastern Europe and the USSR itself during the 20th century. It reviews both the ideology of communism and its history, as well as the basic but difficult question of how one might decide whether an economic system can be defined as successful or not. Simon Kemp is Professor of Psychology at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, with long-standing interests in economic psychology and the history of psychology. His previous books include Public Goods and Private Wants: A Psychological Approach to Government Spending and Medieval Psychology. He has also been editor of the Journal of Economic Psychology.

It is striking how often the first-person memories in Annie Ernaux's 2016 work of life-writing Mémoire de fille are rendered from a third-person perspective. Visual depictions of the author's younger self are shown to us as if the older Ernaux who is narrating the story were present at the scene, seeing her former self from the outside. The events recounted include sexual exploitation and public shaming for falling foul of the era's sexual double standards, and, in the aftermath of this, an identity crisis and an eating disorder. How does Ernaux's complex interplay of empathy and distance with regard to her younger self affect the social and political themes in the work, and the ethical stance of the text towards them? And how is the reader implicated by the perspective through which Ernaux has us view her teenage self of 1958?

Summary: Three studies investigated inheritances. The first, a content analysis of 248 consecutive wills probated in Christchurch, indicated that people predominantly distribute their estates within their families, often to their spouse or equally among their children. Study 2 investigated the significance 89 beneficiaries attached to bequests they had received. Bequests of money or real estate were invested with less personal significance than bequests of specific objects. Study 3 questioned 38 informants about inheritance conflicts, which turned out to be long-lasting, usually confined within families, and common, especially where wills did not distribute resources equally.

A review of previous research indicates that people's valuations of government-supplied services are not closely related to their costs, raising the question of how much people know about the costs of such goods. Respondents rated the value of government- & market-supplied goods & services & estimated their costs in three studies. The respondents made poor estimates of the per capita costs of supplying government services, & were little better at estimating per capita expenditure on a range of market-supplied goods (eg, expenditure on fruit), but they were quite accurate at estimating the prices of individual market-supplied items. Rated values of individual market-supplied items correlated well with the costs of the items, but rated annual values of both government- & market-supplied goods were more weakly correlated with their annual per capita costs. The results suggests that the inaccuracy in estimating the costs of government goods might arise because such items do not have individual item prices rather than because people generally do not pay for them themselves. 5 Tables, 32 References. Adapted from the source document.