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The study focuses on understanding the association between parental socio-economic status (SES) and the likelihood of women experiencing a first birth while single, and identifying societal factors that influence this association in 18 North American and European societies. Previous research has shown that single motherhood occurs disproportionately among those from with lower a lower parental SES. The study assesses whether this is caused by parental SES differences in the risk of single women experiencing a first conception leading to a live birth or by parental SES differences in how likely women are to enter a union during pregnancy. Additionally, an assessment is made of whether cross-national differences in these associations can be explained by a country's access to family planning, norms regarding family formation, and economic inequality. Across countries, a negative gradient of parental SES was found on the likelihood of single women to experience a first pregnancy. The negative gradient was stronger in countries with better access to family planning. In some countries, the negative gradient of parental SES was aggravated during pregnancy because women from lower parental SES were less likely to enter a union. This was mostly found in societies with less conservative norms regarding marriage. The results suggest that certain developments in Western societies may increase socio-economic differentials in family demography.

It has been hypothesized that the capacity of universal basic income (UBI) to attract wider public support is impaired by the strength of productivist cultural norms and values, common to the majority of develope societies. The paper contributes to literature on attitudes towards UBI by empirically investigating this hypothesis from a multi-level cross-national perspective, using the European Social Survey (ESS) Round 8 data on UBI support for 23 countries. It seeks to determine whether and to what extent the strength of cultural productivism can explain cross-national variation in public support for the implementation of UBI. Two main findings are reported. First, the results demonstrate that the public are less susceptible to supporting UBI in countries where average employment commitment is higher. Second, the results show that, even though employment commitment is a strong predictor of cross-national variation in the public support for UBI, the effect is surpassed and explained by GDP, which itself is negatively related to the outcome. The study argues that the capacity of UBI to appeal to the general public is limited by the prosperity of post-industrial societies, rather than by the cultural attachment of their populations to paid work.

Buildings in the United States are responsible for more than 40% of the primary energy and 70% of electricity usage and greatly in CO2 emission by about 39%, more than any other sector including transportation and industry sectors. This energy consumption is expected to grow mainly due to increasing trends in new buildings construction. Rising energy prices alongside with energy independencies, limited resources, and climate change have made the current situation even worse. An Energy Efficient (EE) building is able to reduce the heating and cooling load significantly compared with a code compliant building. Furthermore, integrating renewable energy sources in the building energy portfolio could drive the building's grid reliance further down. Such buildings that are able to passively save and actively produce energy are called Net Zero Energy Buildings (NZEB). Despite all new energy efficient technologies, reaching NZEB is challenging due to high first cost of super-efficient measures and renewable energy sources as well as integration of the newly on-site generated electricity to the grid. Achieving NZEB without looking at its surrounding environment may result in sub-optimal solutions. Currently, 95% of American households own a car, and with the help of newly introduced Vehicle to Home (V2H) technologies, building, vehicle, renewable energy sources, and ecological environment can work together as a techno-ecological system to fulfill the requirement of an NZEB ecosystem.Due to the great flexibility of electric vehicles (EVs) and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) in interacting with the power grid, they will play a significant role in the future of the power system. In a large scale, an organized fleet of EVs can be considered as reliable and flexible power storage for a set of building blocks or in a smaller scale, individual EV owners can use their own vehicles as a source of power alongside with other sources of power. To this end, V2H technologies can utilize idle EV battery power as an electricity storage tool to mitigate fluctuations in renewable electric power supply, to provide electricity for the building during the peak time, and to help in supplying electricity during emergency situation and power outage. V2H is said to be the solution to a successful integration of renewables and at the same time maintaining the integrity of the grid. This happens through depleting the stored power in the battery of EV and then charging the battery when the demand is low, using the electricity provided by grid or renewables. Government incentives can play an important role in employing this technology by buying out the high first time cost request. According to Energy Information Administration (EIA), U.S. residential utility customers consume 29.95 kWh electricity on average per household-day. With the current technology, EV batteries could store up to 30 kWh electricity. As a result, even for a code compliant house, a family could use EV battery as a source of energy for one normal day operation. For an energy efficient home, there could even be a surplus of energy that could be transferred to the grid. In summary, Achieving NZEB is facing various obstacles and removing these barriers require a more holistic view on a greater system and environment, where a building interacts with on-site renewable energy sources, EV, and its surrounded ecological environment.This dissertation aims to utilize the application of Vehicle to Home technology to reach NZEB by developing two new models in two phases; the macro based excel model (NZEB-VBA) and agent based model (NZEB-ABM). Using these two models, homeowners can calculate the savings through implementing abovementioned technologies which can be considered as a motivation to move toward greener buildings. In the first step, an optimization analysis is performed first to select the best design alternatives for an energy-efficient building under the relevant economic and environmental constraints. Next, solar photovoltaic sources are used to supply the building's remaining energy demand and thereby minimize the building's grid reliance. Finally, Vehicle to Home technology is coupled with the renewable energy source as a substitute for power from the grid. The whole algorithm for this process will be running in the visual basic environment.In the second phase of the study, the focus is more on the dynamic interaction of different components of the system with each other. Although the general procedure is the same, the modeling will take place in a different environment. Showing the status of different parts of the system at any specific time, changing the values of different parameters of the system and observing the results, and investigating the impact of each parameter's on overall behavior of the system are among the advantages of the agent based model. Having real time data can greatly enhance the capabilities of this system. The results indicate that, with the help of energy-efficient design features and a properly developed algorithm to draw electricity from EV and solar energy, it is possible to reduce the required electricity from the power grid by 59% when compared to a standard energy-efficient building and by as much as 90% when compared to a typical code-compliant building. This thereby reduces the electricity cost by 1.55 times the cost of the conventional method of drawing grid electricity. This savings can compensate the installation costs of solar panels and other technologies necessary for a Net Zero Energy Building. In the last phase of the study, a regional analysis will be performed to investigate the effect of different weather conditions, traffic situation and driving behavior on the behavior of this system. ; 2016-12-01 ; Ph.D. ; Engineering and Computer Science, Civil, Environmental and Construction Engineering ; Doctoral ; This record was generated from author submitted information.

The present study aims to identify the factors approaching and distancing users from the purchase of electric vehicles. The main objective is, therefore, to determine which characteristics - of the vehicle, the service and / or the external context - lead consumers to make the decision to buy or not buy this type of automobile. A qualitative analysis of 5 interviewed professional from the EV sector was conducted, followed by the analysis of 250 questionnaire target market's responses. The results predict that the Environmental Performance (EP), the Governmental Tax incentives and TCO (TAX_TCO) as well as the Maintenance cost reduction (MCR) EV's attributes are the greatest consumption Approaching factors. On the other hand, the Charging facilities availability (CFA), the Time cost of charging and the Driving experience (DE) are suggested as the attributes most distancing consumers from a purchase. Furthermore, other conclusions were drawn particularly concerning the significance of test-driving experiences and EVs. Moreover, findings also suggest that non-EV owners perceive greater autonomy for PHEVS than users who currently own an EV. Finally, key takeaways were drawn, aiming towards a greater EV's sales success rate, EV customer's satisfaction and an overall increase in demand and market share. ; O presente estudo tem como objetivo identificar os fatores que aproximam e distanciam os consumidores da compra de veículos elétricos. O objetivo principal é, portanto, determinar quais as características - do veículo, do serviço e / ou do contexto externo - que levam o consumidor a tomar a decisão de comprar ou não este tipo de automóvel. Uma análise qualitativa a 5 profissionais do setor entrevistados foi primeiramente conduzida, seguida de uma análise quantitativa de 250 respostas a um questionário desenhado e proposto ao público em geral. Os resultados preveem que o Desempenho Ambiental, os incentivos fiscais governamentais e o custo total da posse, bem como a redução de custo de manutenção, são os atributos dos veículos elétricos que mais aproximam os consumidores da decisão final de compra. Por outro lado, a Disponibilidade de Instalações de Carregamento, o Custo do Tempo de Carregamento e a Experiência de Condução são apontados como os atributos que mais distanciam o consumidor de uma compra. Para além destas, outras conclusões foram tiradas, particularmente em relação à importância das experiências de test-drive. Mais ainda, os resultados obtidos também sugerem que os indivíduos que não são proprietários de veículos elétricos pontuam estes com maior autonomia do que os usuários que realmente possuem um. Foram assim traçadas conclusões ao nível empresarial, visando uma maior taxa de sucesso de vendas de Veículos elétricos, de satisfação de clientes de VE e um aumento geral na procura dos mesmos.

The growing importance of the Internet of Energy (IoE) brands the high-renewables electricity system a realistic scenario for the future electricity system market design. In general, the whole gist behind the IoE is developed upon a somewhat broader idea encompassing the so-called &ldquo ; Internet of Things&rdquo ; (IoT), which envisioned a plethora of household appliances, utensils, clothing, smart trackers, smart meters, and vehicles furnished with tiny devices. These devices would record all possible data from all those objects in real time and allow for a two-way exchange of information that makes it possible to optimize their use. IoT employs the Internet Protocol (IP) and the worldwide web (WWW) network for transferring information and data through various types of networks and gateways as well as sensor technologies. This paper presents an outline stemming from the implications of the high-renewables electric system that would employ the Internet of Energy (IoE). In doing so, it focuses on the implications that IoE brings into the high-renewables electricity market inhabited by smart homes, smart meters, electric vehicles, solar panels, and wind turbines, such as the peer-to-peer (P2P) energy exchange between prosumers, optimization of location of charging stations for electric vehicles (EVs), or the information and energy exchange in the smart grids. We show that such issues as compatibility, connection speed, and most notoriously, trust in IoE applications among households and consumers would play a decisive role in the transition to the high-renewables electricity systems of the 21st century. Our findings demonstrate that the decentralized approach to energy system effective control and operation that is offered by IoE is highly likely to become ubiquitous as early as 2030. Since it may be optimal that large-scale rollouts start in the early 2020s, some form of government incentives and funding (e.g. subsidies for installing wind turbines or solar panels or special feed-in-tariffs for buying renewable energy) may be needed for the energy market to make early progress in embracing more renewables and in reducing the costs of later investments. In addition, there might be some other alternative approaches aimed at facilitating this development. We show that the objective is to minimize the overall system cost, which consists of the system investment cost and the system operating cost, subject to CO2 emissions constraints and the operating constraints of generation units, network assets, and novel carbon-free technologies, which is quite cumbersome given the trend in consumption and the planned obsolescence. This can be done through increasing energy efficiency, developing demand side management strategies, and improving matching between supply and demand side, just to name a few possibilities.

If you have not been paying attention, our government has decided that all electric vehicles are the solution to the climate problem. At least as long as they are made in the US with union labor and benefits. California has committed to banning the sale of anything else. In today's post, a few tidbits from my daily WSJ reading on the subject. From Holman Jenkins on electric cars:  If the goal were to reduce emissions, the world would impose a carbon tax. Then what kind of EVs would we get? Not Teslas but hybrids like Toyota's Prius. "A wheelbarrow full of rare earths and lithium can power either one [battery-powered car] or over 90 hybrids, but, uh, that fact seems to be lost on policymakers," a California dealer recently emailed me.[Note: that wheelbarrow of rare earths comes from multiple truckloads of actual rocks. Also see original for links.] ...The same battery minerals in one Tesla can theoretically supply 37 times as much emissions reduction when distributed over a fleet of Priuses.This is a shock only to those who weren't paying attention. It certainly isn't lost on government. Chris Atkinson, the Ohio State University sustainable transportation guru whose slogan I've cited before—"the best use of a battery is in a hybrid"—was a key official in the Obama Energy Department.Our policies don't exist to incentivize carbon reduction, they exist to lure affluent Americans to make space in their garages for oversized, luxurious EVs so Tesla can report a profit and so other automakers can rack up smaller losses on the "compliance" vehicles they create in obedience to government mandates.Actually, I vote GMC's 9,000 lb, 1,000 hp. 0-60 in 3 seconds $110,000 electric Hummer the prize for most conspicuous mis-use of Chinese lithium and its associated carbon emissions.  Tesla's new "cyber truck" comes close. I can't wait to see those driving around Palo Alto. Mining the required minerals produces emissions. Keeping the battery charged produces emissions. Jenkins is a pretty good economist. There is supply and demand:  Only if a great deal of gasoline-based driving is displaced would there be net reduction in CO2. But who says any gasoline-based driving is being displaced? When government ladles out tax breaks for EVs, when wealthy consumers splurge on a car that burns electrons instead of gasoline, they simply leave more gasoline available for someone else to consume at a lower price.Stop just a minute and digest this one, if you have not already. If you use less gas, someone else uses more. EV subsidies just shift who uses the gas. The same supply just goes somewhere else. One has to subsidize electrics so much that the price of gas goes down, permanently, so that it's not worth bringing out of the ground. And the price and demand are global. Lower prices encourage Indians and Africans to finally get cheap gas powered cars.  This may be a secret to you, the public. It's not to economists.Well, some economists. Alas my beloved profession is as open to virtue signaling as everyone else so I don't see a loud "stop subsidizing battery only EVs and banning everything else" from economists. The problem here is the problem with any plan to subsidize our way to emissions reduction. Humans are perfectly capable of consuming both renewable and dirty energy in ever-growing quantities if the price is right. The emissions data prove as much....By incorporating carbon taxes into its tax systems, global society might at least slow the rate of CO2 emissions while simultaneously improving the efficiency of its tax codes. It still seemed unlikely, but it wasn't clear why. After all, politicians enact plenty of taxes. Governments have been advised for decades to adopt consumption taxes as a way to fund their welfare states without destroying the possibility of growth. Cramming a lot into one delicious column, Jenkins wonders at human nature: How to explain, along the way, the coevolution of the climate empty gesture with climate rhetoric that increasingly shouts the unfounded claim that climate change threatens human survival? I explain it this way: When it became clear nobody was going to do anything about climate change, it became safe to engage in hysterical rhetoric about climate change....As David Burge put it (thanks to an anonymous colleague for this delicious tidbit)"To help poor children, I am going to launch flaming accordions into the Grand Canyon.""That's stupid.""WHY DO YOU HATE POOR CHILDREN?"Climate change is real. Climate change matters. Addressing it is expensive. Other environmental problems clamor for resources too. Europe has stopped growing, and the US is headed the same way. We don't have trillions to waste. California as always leads the way on the beau geste: ... in California, ... drayage trucks, which carry containerized cargo to and from ports and rail centers, face a looming deadline. The state will require any new drayage trucks added to fleets starting next year to run on electric batteries or hydrogen fuel cells. California also plans to phase out sales of new gasoline-powered passenger cars, pickup trucks and SUVs by 2035 and require all new medium- and heavy-duty truck sales be zero-emissions by 2036. ... Trucks represent 6% of the vehicles on California's roads, but a quarter of the state's on-road greenhouse-gas emissions,.... California plans to spend $1.7 billion for medium- and heavy-duty infrastructure for zero-emission vehicles by 2026.$1.7 billion, for state-provided "infrastructure," on top of the costs to industries... for a benefit of...?  The central problem: How are they going to recharge those trucks? [Truck operators] They position trucks near highways, rail or ports, not available power. As fleets add trucks they may need to draw an additional 6 to 8 megawatts of power or more. "That's about 1,000 homes," said Steve Powell, chief executive of utility Southern California Edison. "We may need a new substation or something like that and a line to be built." It has not been built, and the truck deadline is now. So what do operators do?  A mobile charging system in California runs on natural gas. PHOTO: PROLOGIS MOBILITY, from Wall Street JournalSouthern California Edison has come across some fleets powering chargers using diesel generators...so that new EV trucks don't sit unused. Another solution: more batteries. [Pacific Drayage Services President] Gillis is installing a system of chargers paired with battery storage. It can discharge power to trucks even during times of grid stress. The battery storage itself can recharge at a time of day when electricity prices are the cheapest. There is an important point here on just how many batteries are needed for the "transition."  Don't just count the batteries in the trucks. Count the batteries in the charging stations too. And the utility. Even California knows that it does no good to electrify and then power the grid with coal and natural gas. The plan is for solar and wind electricity, but that needs utility scale battery backup. A week or more of power. The sources of my last post only added up the batteries needed for the cars. That's too low by many multiples.  He is also hedging—Gillis tripled his usual order of new diesel trucks from 30 to 100, which will arrive by year-end, just beating the deadline before California phases them out.I get the idea. Build it and they will come. Put the trucks in place now, so what if at huge cost, and so what if we burn coal to power them. Then when solar and wind and utility scale storage arrive, the users will be there. But trucks don't last that long. By 20 years when all that infrastructure finally has its permits, today's electric trucks will be long gone. Covering Kerry's trip to China, a reminder that climate is all about how China and India develop, not which car San Franciscans use to drive up to Tahoe. The Climate Action Tracker says that between 2015 and 2022 China's greenhouse gas emissions increased nearly 12%, while U.S. emissions declined some 5%. China's methane emissions rose about 3% from 2015 to 2021, the latest year with good data, while the U.S. cut them by 5%.... China's "coal production reached record levels in 2022 for the second year running," and "coal is set to remain the backbone" of China's energy system. No kidding: Between 2020 and 2022, China added some 113 gigawatts of new coal-fired power plants, according to S&P Global Commodity Insights. The entire world managed to retire some 187 gigawatts of coal plants between 2017 and 2022.As of January China had some 306 coal-fired power stations proposed, permitted or under construction, according to Global Energy Monitor, a nonprofit that tracks worldwide coal-fired power projects of 30 megawatts or more. When finished those plants would generate some 366 gigawatts, or about 68% of the world's total coal capacity under development.As of April China also had 180 new coal mines or mine expansions proposed, permitted or under construction, the nonprofit reported.In a lovely article  Aatish Taseer reminds us there are 1.3 billion people in India (as well as 1.4 billion in China). It's hot, just like it is in Texas. When they reach middle income, they will want air conditioning, just like in Texas. This doesn't make the virtue-signaling tour because there is no easy answer. If China and India don't think they can grow based on solar, wind, and nuclear, just what can we do about it? Send more diplomats? It does not help that the US is now deciding to "disengage" and fight some sort of battle for economic supremacy via industrial policy trade restrictions and tariffs. Even Taiwan on a silver platter isn't going to get China to change. Even if the US shuts down, de-growths, and goes back to subsistence farming, China will spew CO2. I guess the argument is go first to establish a moral example. But if that moral example is obviously self-defeating, pointless, and just money down ratholes to entrenched interests, I doubt it will shame China to much action. A carbon tax, and a Manhattan project to drive down the cost of nuclear would make a whole lot more sense.  (Half the Manhattan project is technical, the other half is to rewrite the regulatory rule book on a wartime schedule.) Think what you could do with the trillion or so dollars going to various subsidies and mandates. Update Read "Old Eagle Eye" excellent July 19 comment below. Boiling it all down to a nutshell, our policy path now is going to produce energy with a lot more materials -- rocks, steel, concrete, batteries, aluminum, carbon fibre -- and energy to produce those materials, relative to fossil fuels or nuclear. Producing those materials also produces more carbon now, with a hoped for savings later.  That the 1970s environmental movement ends up with a huge increase in making stuff from rocks, rather than a service-oriented economy with small impact power, first natural gas and then nuclear, and a light touch upon the earth, is a bit of a paradox.   Also, in addition to spending our trillion dollars and industrial policy wonks on making nuclear cheap and abundant, if a warming climate really is an economic and environmental problem, and given the current policy path is both ineffective and hugely expensive, why should we not even speak or research geoengineering? It's not ideal, but nothing is ideal. 

The COVID-19 pandemic is posing a threat to people all across the globe. According to traditional literature, threat perceptions induce anti-immigrant sentiments, as ingroup identity and self-interest are strengthened at the expense of the outgroup. In this study, we investigate whether the COVID-19 pandemic indeed increases anti-immigrant sentiments, or that this type of threat elicits other or no group related responses. We also look at whether such responses are expressed more strongly among specific subgroups in Dutch society. To do so, we use unique longitudinal panel data based on the European Values Study 2017, with a repeated measure in May 2020, during the national 'intelligent lockdown' in the Netherlands. Based on structural equation modeling, we demonstrate that anti-immigrant sentiments have not increased due to (perceived threat of) the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, negative opinions towards immigrants decreased between 2017 and 2020 in the Netherlands, for which we provide alternative explanations. Although some subgroups do experience more threat than others due to the coronavirus, such as women, first generation immigrants, and the elderly, this does not lead to more negative feelings towards outgroups. Whether this is due to the fact that individuals feel threatened by everyone, regardless of group membership, should be explored in future research.

This article empirically explores the interplay between the secular, post-Lutheran majority culture and Muslim immigrants in Sweden. It presents the ambiguous role of religion in the country's mainstream discourse, the othering of religion that is characteristic to this, and the expectations of Muslims to be strongly religious that follows as its consequence. Four results of a web-panel survey with Swedes of Muslim and Christian family background are then presented: (1) Both groups largely distance themselves from their own religious heritage - the Muslims do this in a more definite way; (2) the Muslim respondents have more secular values and identities than the Christians; (3) contrary expectations, Christian respondents show more affinity to their religious heritage than the Muslims do to theirs; and (4) the fusion between the groups is prominent. The article concludes that equating religious family heritage with religious identity is precipitous in the case of Swedish Muslims.

The main purpose of the present study is to examine the relationship between religiosity and gender traditionalism in a secular and Muslim country, Turkey. Based on previous research and perspectives several hypotheses were developed to test. A joint data, which is collected by European Value Survey and World Value Survey from Turkey in 2018, was used for analysis. A series of models of linear logistic regression was created to test the effect of each predictor variable on traditional gender beliefs. The results indicated that subjective religiosity and given importance to religion were strongly, significantly, and positively associated with gender traditionalism while prayer practice showed a slight and positive effect on gender traditionalism. Implications of the study were discussed and concluded, limitations were identified for future work.

Oxford COVID-19 Database (OxCOVID19 Database) is a comprehensive source of information related to the COVID-19 pandemic. This relational database contains time-series data on epidemiology, government responses, mobility, weather and more across time and space for all countries at the national level, and for more than 50 countries at the regional level. It is curated from a variety of (wherever available) official sources. Its purpose is to facilitate the analysis of the spread of SARS-CoV-2 virus and to assess the effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions to reduce the impact of the pandemic. Our database is a freely available, daily updated tool that provides unified and granular information across geographical regions.

Abstract
Why did Poland not join the Eurozone despite being integrated economically and dependent on investments and trade with existing Eurozone countries? The reluctance of its government seems puzzling taking into consideration Polish economic exposure to Eurozone countries as well as its commitment to switch to the euro stemming from EU treaties. The Polish governmental position on Eurozone accession demonstrates that monetary integration is not only an economic and legal issue, but it also results from political decisions of individual governments. This paper argues that a complementary understanding of the position of the Polish government on Eurozone accession is possible by looking at domestic ideas and interests. For this aim, the societal approach to governmental preference formation is employed. It focuses on the influence of domestic ideas (value-based collective expectations of voters) and interests (cost-benefit calculations of lobby groups) on governmental positions. In applying the societal approach, this paper has two goals: first, to show that the Polish governments' reluctance to join the Eurozone stems from domestic societal pressures (value-based ideas and material interests) and, second, to specify the conditions for either ideas' or interests' individual bearing on the government's preference.

In this paper, we untangle the relationship between the HRM occupation's feminine image and the representation of the HRM function on executive boards. A Monte Carlo simulation analysis of 172 executive boards in Austria, Germany, France, Spain, and Sweden shows that women on boards are disproportionately often responsible for HRM and having a woman on the board corresponds to HRM being represented on the board. Additional exploratory analyses of country contexts indicate that this relationship is not universal. Considering several explanations for these country differences, we propose that institutional pressures promoting women's integration into boards is the main reason for the differences. Organisations yield to this pressure and reduce the anticipated performance risks by appointing women with function‐specific experience to board positions responsible for HRM - a function perceived as matching women's stereotypically assumed talents.

En prolongeant la perspective analytique de Durkheim, cet article entend poser un cadre théorique pour étudier les liens qui attachent les individus entre eux et à la société. Il crée des indicateurs statistiques pour comparer les pays européens et aussi, à titre exploratoire, les différentes régions de la Suisse. Il permet de distinguer quatre types idéaux de régimes d'attachement (familialiste, volontariste, organiciste et universaliste), de vérifier leur validité empirique et de montrer certaines spécificités nationales et régionales.

We study the relationship between inter-class inequality and intergenerational class mobility across 39 countries. Previous research on the relationship between economic inequality and class mobility remains inconclusive, as studies have confounded intra- with between-class economic inequalities. We propose that between-class inequality across multiple dimensions accounts for the inverse relationship between inequality and mobility: the larger the resource distance between classes, the less likely it is that mobility from one to the other will occur. We consider inequality in terms of between-class differences in three areas—education, wages, and income—and in a composite measure. Building on sociological mobility theory, we argue that cross-country variation in mobility results, in part, from families adapting to different levels of between-class inequality. Consistent with this hypothesis, we find a negative correlation between inter-class inequality and social fluidity, with between-class inequality being a better predictor of mobility chances than conventional distributional measures. We also find that the resource distance between classes is negatively related to the strength of their intergenerational association for some off-diagonal origin and destination (OD) class combinations.

Electric cars will never account for more than a third of the market and consumers should not be forced to buy them, the boss of Toyota has said.Akio Toyoda, chairman of the world's biggest carmaker by sales, said that electric vehicles (EVs) should not be developed to the exclusion of other technologies such as the hybrid and hydrogen-powered cars that his company has focused on.Speaking to employees in a question and answer session, Mr Toyoda called for a "multi-pathway approach", adding: "The enemy is CO2."Well, that very first assertion might not be correct. We certainly don't know and we'd not try to impose our ignorance upon everyone else either. Which is exactly what our actual governors have forgotten. No one does know what is going to be the correctly different technology other than the internal combustion engine. It could even be that the ICE remains but powered by manufactured petrol from renewables derived hydrogen. Again, we don't say it will be but it's a viable technological path. Among us here we know alarmingly large amounts about the lithium for batteries market, have actually worked in the supply chain of the fuel cells for those hydrogen cars, are up to date on renewables and Fischer Tropsch and so on - and we still don't know.Except we do know the right way for the decision to be made. Which is to have the one, technology independent intervention to deal with the externality. Then leave the market be to sort through all the potentially viable alternatives and see which one wins. Instead of the current system of people with a great deal less knowledge than we've got picking the loser. We can tell it's the losing technology by the insistence upon its imposition - no law is necessary to force people to use a winner.We're even fortunate enough to not have to impose a new insistence or penalty. As repeated investigations from the likes of the IMF and so on point out the current UK level of petrol/diesel taxation is at or above the Stern Review carbon tax level. We've already done everything necessary as an intervention, now we just have to wait and see.Or rather, we've already done far too much for as well as the correct carbon tax we've that legal insistence on most of the solutions not being allowed. Which is the error of course. Markets do work and one of the times when they really, really, work is when we face technological uncertainty. Create the incentive to replace, sure, but then leave be to see what wins that replacement battle. The real and underlying logic to that being that we don't, in fact, know what us the people want from the replacement. Therefore how can any planner possibly provide what is unknown? We need the period of market experimentation to find out…..