Suchergebnisse

In this essay, Kevin Riley examines the history of amphetamine use by long-haul truck drivers in the United States in the postwar era, providing an extended analysis of the complex ways stimulant use was embedded in industry practice. Riley demonstrates the black market in amphetamines on the nation's highways was inextricably tied to the business of unregulated trucking—an overall absence of regulatory control on the "competitive fringe" of the industry meant exposure to intense competitive conditions that encouraged excessive drive times and subsequent reliance on stimulants. Riley also considers the predominant responses to the amphetamine problem by trucking industry representatives, government officials, organized labor, and the mass media, all of which helped to obscure the work-related roots of the amphetamine problem. The essay contributes to an understanding of how the corporeality of work is both molded by larger economic and political forces and enshrouded in cultural meaning.

This study examines how official national population projections—a key mechanism for the production and dissemination of demographic knowledge—contributed to differing interpretations of population and fertility trends in France and Great Britain in the decades following World War II, despite these countries' similar fertility rates during most of this period. Projections presented different visions of the demographic future in the two countries. In France, publication of multiple variants emphasized future contingency, with low variants illustrating future population decline due to prolonged below‐replacement fertility. In Britain, publication of a single variant, assuming near‐replacement‐level fertility rates, projected moderate growth. National population projections thus created divergent representations of the two countries' demographic futures: an ever‐present threat of population decline in France, and a reassuring image of stability in Britain. Two principal mechanisms that contributed to cross‐national differences in population projections—national demographic history and institutional configurations—are discussed.

Do all types of demand have the same effect on output? To answer this question, I estimate a cointegrated vector autoregressive (VAR) model of consumption, investment, and government spending on US data, 1955-2007. I find that: (1) economic growth can be decomposed into a short-run (transitory) cycle gravitating around a long-run (permanent) trend made of consumption shocks and government spending; (2) the estimated fluctuations are investment dominated, they coincide remarkably with the business cycle, and they are highly correlated with capacity utilization in both labor and capital; and (3) the long-run multipliers point to a large induced-investment phenomenon and to a smaller, but still significantly positive, government spending multiplier, around 1.5. The results cover a lot of theoretical ground: Paul Samuelson's accelerator principle, John Kenneth Galbraith's stress on consumption and government spending, Jan Tinbergen's investment-driven business cycle, and Robert Eisner's inquiries on the investment function. The results are particularly useful to distinguish between economic policies for the short and long runs, albeit no attempt is made at this point to inquire into the effectiveness of specific economic policies.