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What is the role of the ambulance in the American city? The prevailing narrative provides a rather simple answer: saving and transporting the critically ill and injured. This is not an incorrect description, but it is incomplete. Drawing on field observations, medical records, and his own experience as a novice emergency medical technician, sociologist Josh Seim reimagines paramedicine as a frontline institution for governing urban suffering. Bandage, Sort, and Hustle argues that the ambulance is part of a fragmented regime that is focused more on neutralizing hardships (which are disproportionately carried by poor people and people of color) than on eradicating the root causes of agony. Whether by compressing lifeless chests on the streets or by transporting the publicly intoxicated into the hospital, ambulance crews tend to handle suffering bodies near the bottom of the polarized metropolis. Seim illustrates how this work puts crews in recurrent, and sometimes tense, contact with the emergency department nurses and police officers who share their clientele. These street-level relations, however, cannot be understood without considering the bureaucratic and capitalistic forces that control and coordinate ambulance labor from above. Beyond the ambulance, this book motivates a labor-centric model for understanding the frontline governance of down-and-out populations

"While private monopolists are generally assumed to maximize profits, the goals of public enterprises are less well known. Using the example of Pennsylvania's state liquor retailing monopoly, we use information on store location choices, prices, wholesale costs, and sales to uncover the goals implicit in its entry decisions. Does it seek to maximize profits or welfare? We estimate a spatial model of demand for liquor that allows us to calculate counterfactual configurations of stores that maximize profit and welfare. We find that welfare maximizing networks have roughly twice as many stores as would maximize profit. Moreover, the actual network is much more similar in size and configuration to the welfare maximizing configuration. An alternative to a state monopoly would be the common practice of regulated private entry. While such regimes can give rise to inefficient location decisions, little is known about the size of the resulting inefficiencies. Even for a given number of stores, a simple characterization of free entry with our model results in a store configuration that produces welfare losses of between 3 and 9% of revenue. This is a third to half of the overall loss from unregulated free entry"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site

In response to an invitation from the Chinese mental health platform, Jiandanxinli, and its CEO Li Zhen, the International Psychotherapy Institute developed and implemented a two-year training programme, "Object relations psychoanalytic psychotherapy" to be held on-site in Beijing, and online weekly. This contribution begins with an example of the teaching intrinsic to the programme, and then describes the programme itself.

The objective of Norwegian security policy is to prevent or, if necessary, repel aggression on Norwegian territory. In addition, our Norwegian security policy is intended to enable us to resist any attempted political or military coercion so that we may remain free to determine ourselves the structure of our society.

This article reimagines poverty governance as a labor process. Extending theories of bureaucratic fields and street-level bureaucracies, the proposed model suggests that the state manages the poor through fragmented activities embedded in horizontal and vertical relations of production. I use an ethnography of 911 ambulance operations in a single California county to advance this perspective. From plugging gunshot wounds to moving sidewalk slumberers, ambulance crews interact with a mostly impoverished clientele base by transforming spaces in bodies and bodies in spaces. This two-sided governance puts the ambulance in recurrent contact with the hospital emergency department and the police squad car. Across these institutions, ambulance crews struggle with their nurse and police counterparts over the horizontal shuffling of burdensome work, shaping the life chances of their subjects in the process. At the same time, bureaucratic and capitalistic forces from above activate a lean ambulance fleet that is minimally wasteful and highly flexible. This verticality structures clientele processing through the ambulance and fuels tensions across the frontlines of governance. In an effort to advance theory and fill an empirical gap, this article proposes a new model for understanding the management of marginality and highlights an overlooked case of poverty regulation.

Roughly 700,000 people are released from American prisons every year, yet we know little about their ground-level experiences at or near the moment of exit. This ethnographic study fills part of the gap by examining the aspirations and corresponding actions of soon-to-be-released prisoners, "short-timers." While previous research suggests this population wants a "successful reentry," few have detailed such a desire beyond its obvious mismatch with life chances. I show that in addition to verbalizing lucid hopes and plans for the "straight life," short-timers act in reference to these aspirations while incarcerated by drawing on two meager resources: family and penitentiary. Such aspirations and actions are not markers of ignorance. Instead, I argue that they signal a practical orientation in a world where staff dominate inmates. In friction with the durable forces of inmate objectification, short-timers can use future-oriented perceptions and practices to realize some degree of selfhood. Meanwhile, their custodians, who are never committed to despotic control or total mortification, impose complementary lessons in personal responsibility through the discourse of prisoner reentry. Besides spotlighting a rarely studied moment in prison, I offer a model for how prisoner subjectivity emerges as both a rejection and product of penal power.

A discussion of topics connected with "historical memory" and "politics of memory" presupposes that we consider how and why we are approaching the past. In this paper I shall point to some ways the past is being approached by individuals, social groups and political authorities – and some reasons for such approaches. But I shall also consider the opposite choice, that of not wanting to get closer to the past, preferring instead to keep a safe distance or even to ignore it, at least painful parts of it. Memories in different forms are important in our approaches to the past. The same is true for scientific history. The interplay between memory and historical science is complicated in itself. The existence of political guidance or explicit political provisions concerning the past makes it even more complicated to understand how our relations with the past are shaped and what their functions are in a given society. In my opinion, it is impossible to generalize about such problems. But comparisons may be fruitful, for instance presentations of wars in school textbooks from different countries, or how succeeding political regimes in one country try to charge the urban landscape with a new (or old) political meaning that legitimizes the present regime or demonize another one, by changing street names, erecting or destroying monuments etc. National anthems are another field that is suited for meaningful comparisons. And even communal or personal memories that are studied without a comparison or generalization in mind may provide ideas and perspectives for dealing with quite different memories under other political conditions. Finally, the role of the presumed scientific historian ought to be examined a little. Is he or she just a rational and neutral judge of the past – compared to ordinary people with undocumented and emotional memories, or to politicians with ideological motives for approaching the past?

This thesis contains four essays. The first paper, "Real or Evasion Responses to the Wealth Tax? Theory and Evidence from Sweden", addresses the behavioral effects of an annual wealth tax. I use Swedish tax records over the period 1999-2006 and two sources of variation in the tax rate to estimate the elasticity of taxable net wealth at about 0.3. I decompose the effects into reporting and savings responses and find that an increase in the tax is likely to stimulate evasion. Using military enlistment records on cognitive ability, I find that high-skilled individuals respond more to the tax. The second paper, "Job Displacement and Labor Market Outcomes by Skill Level", uses previously unexplored administrative data on all displaced workers in Sweden 2002-2004 to estimate how the incidence and effects of job loss depend on cognitive and noncognitive skills. I find that workers with low ability are significantly more likely to be displaced but the recovery rates upon job loss show no significant differences across skill groups. The third paper, "Complementary Roles of Connections and Performance in Political Selection in China", analyzes who becomes a top politician in China. It focuses on the promotions of provincial leaders and estimates how performance - measured by provincial economic growth – and connections with top politicians – measured by having worked together in the past – influence promotions. Using data for the period 1993-2009, we find a positive correlation between promotion and growth that is stronger for connected leaders. The fourth paper, "Does the Demand for Redistribution Rise or Fall with Cognitive Ability?", uses data from enlistment and a tailor-made survey that elicits redistributional preferences. On a scale of 0 to 100 percent redistribution, a one standard deviation increase in cognitive ability lowers demand by 6 percentage points, also when controlling for past, current and future expected income.