Tax Policy and the Economy publishes current academic research findings on taxation and government spending that have both immediate bearing on policy debates and longer-term interest. The papers in this volume range from topics as broad as the relative efficacy of tax cuts versus spending increases as a form of economic stimulus to a targeted analysis of the Low Income Housing Tax Credit. Also included are two papers at that examine different aspects of policies designed to provide fiscal stimulus, as well as an examination of the effects of recent reforms in the Earned Income Tax Credit.

Using debate to develop advanced competency in a second language is a method that is finding increased interest among instructors and students alike, whether in synchronous online teaching or the individual classroom. Through debate, students learn how to make hypotheses, support their conclusions with evidence, and deploy the rhetoric of persuasion in the target language. Though this method provides an exciting pedagogy for moving students from the advanced to the superior level, there is a paucity of materials available for instructors who wish to plan a curriculum focused on debate. Teaching Advanced Language Skills through Global Debate: Theory and Practice provides teachers with both the theoretical underpinnings for using debate in the foreign language classroom as well as practical advice for developing reading, listening, writing, and speaking skills through debate. It discusses task-based language learning and helps instructors design debate-related tasks for the classroom.

Teaching Advanced Language Skills through Global Debate will be useful for any instructor working at the advanced level, and particularly for those training future language instructors. One of the new digital short publications available through Georgetown University Press, it is an ideal complement to the press’s new titles on mastering languages through global debate.

Georgetown Digital Shorts—longer than an article, shorter than a book—deliver timely works of peer-reviewed scholarship in a fast-paced, agile environment. They present new ideas and original texts that are easily and widely available to students, scholars, libraries, and general readers.

From the postapocalyptic world of Blade Runner to theJames Cameron mega-hit Terminator, tech-noir has emerged as a distinct genre, with roots in both the Promethean myth and the earlier popular traditions of gothic, detective, and science fiction. In this new volume, many well-known film and literary works—including The Matrix, RoboCop, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—are discussed with reference to their relationship to tech-noir and one another. Featuring an extensive, clearly indexed filmography, Tech-Noir Film will be of great interest to anyone wishing to learn more about the development of this new and highly innovative genre.

The fruit of more than three decades of research

This collection of fourteen essays by Eberhard W. Güting covers important aspects of editorial science with a particular focus on New Testament textual criticism. Essays cover textual emendation, text-critical procedures, literary criticism, history of scholarship, advantages and disadvantages of online manuscripts, and text-critical studies of words and phrases. The addition of a substantial introduction to text criticism makes this a valuable resource for students and teachers.

Features

• Essays concerned with establishing the original text of New Testament writings
• Nine essays published in English for the first tim
• Two previously unpublished essays

Taken together, these comprehensive volumes offer an authoritative account of the music of Africa. One of the most prominent experts on the subject, Gerhard Kubik draws on his extensive travels and three decades of study in many parts of the continent to compare and contrast a wealth of musical traditions from a range of cultures.

In the first volume, Kubik describes and examines xylophone playing in southern Uganda and harp music from the Central African Republic; compares multi-part singing from across the continent; and explores movement and sound in eastern Angola. And in the second volume, he turns to the cognitive study of African rhythm, Yoruba chantefables, the musical Kachamba family of Malaŵi, and African conceptions of space and time.

How do we know reality? The prevalent theory has been that we construct knowledge upon absolute foundations, the way the Egyptians built pyramids. In recent years this foundationalist account has come under attack from a number of directions, from those who want to make epistemology a branch of cognitive science to those who reject out of hand the search for foundational certainty. Richard Foley’s book defends a modified form of foundationalism that does not depend on our having privileged access to the truth of foundational propositions.

Foley presents the idea of rational belief going back to Aristotle’s concept of rationality—as the basis for what he calls “subjective foundationalism.” Epistemological rationality is subjective for Foley because he sees the rationality of a belief as dependent on the cognitive resources and tendencies of the believer. He is able thereby to accommodate the strong “internalist” intuition telling us that whether it is rational for us to believe something depends on how that thing appears within our perspective on the world. But Foley removes a large part of the curse of subjectivism by making rationality dependent not on what the subject thinks, or is inclined to think at the moment of belief, but on what the subject would be inclined to think as a result of an ideally conducted reflection.

The foundationalists, he asserts, with their obsessive search for guarantors of truth, get the structure of epistemic rationality right but the spirit wrong. Foley gives a novel and provocative account of the nature of epistemic rationality.

Jean-Marie Morel (1728–1810), a leading French landscape designer and theorist, is now mainly remembered as the author of one of the fundamental eighteenth-century texts in the history of landscape architecture, the Théorie des jardins (1776; second edition, 1802). With his background as an engineer, Morel was instrumental in shaping the functions of landscape architecture, opening up a new professional domain by coining the term architecte-paysagiste, the precursor to the modern designation “landscape architect.”

Morel stands out among eighteenth-century theorists because of his interest in the natural processes that underlie the formation of landscape. His unique theoretical contribution was, therefore, an attempt to develop an approach to garden design grounded in the new understanding of natural processes, which brought together picturesque theory and landscape practice, taking into account a wide range of environmental factors that had an impact on the work of an architecte-paysagiste. Morel believed that an awareness of the character of each landscape was particularly important because of the emotional response that it was likely to elicit.

This translation marks the first time the 1776 edition of the Théorie des jardins is available in English.

The 1970s promised important readjustments in relations among the great powers, perhaps a reconstituted Europe and Asia, as well as a possible new role for "third world" countries. National attitudes toward the law of nations both shaped and reflected developments of this nature. As a great power, the Soviet Union was a principal actor in what transpired, but until now there has been no systematic exposition in the English language of how Soviet jurists regarded the world legal order.

The present volume, published in Moscow in 1970, is the most profound and comprehensive study of international legal theory yet produced by a Soviet jurist. Its author, who holds the Chair of International Law at Moscow State University and for many years was the legal adviser to the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is widely credited with elaborating the juridical underpinnings of peaceful coexistence in the USSR from the mid-1950s. This book, earlier versions of which have appeared in Eastern and Western Europe, contains the fullest statement of his views.

Tunkin traces the development and shaping of international law since 1917, the processes of forming and modifying international legal rules, and the nature of state responsibility under the law of nations. Of special interest to the general reader and specialist in international affairs will be Tunkin's extensive discussion of the interaction among international law, foreign policy, and diplomacy; of the legal nature of international organizations; of the principal factors at work in international politics; and of the nature of legal ties among socialist countries. The latter has been a special concern following the Czechoslovak events of 1968 and the adoption of a comprehensive program for economic integration among socialist states.

For this American edition, Tunkin has brought his book up to date and Dr. Butler has supplied an introduction, a translation note, a list of the author's publications, and a glossary of Russian international legal terms.

John Rawls aims to express an essential part of the common core of the democratic tradition—justice as fairness—and to provide an alternative to utilitarianism, which had dominated the Anglo-Saxon tradition of political thought since the nineteenth century. Rawls substitutes the ideal of the social contract as a more satisfactory account of the basic rights and liberties of citizens as free and equal persons. “Each person,” writes Rawls, “possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override.” Advancing the ideas of Rousseau, Kant, Emerson, and Lincoln, Rawls’s theory is as powerful today as it was when first published.

Though the revised edition of A Theory of Justice, published in 1999, is the definitive statement of Rawls’s view, much of the extensive literature on his theory refers to the original. This first edition is available for scholars and serious students of Rawls’s work.

Since it appeared in 1971, John Rawls's A Theory of Justice has become a classic. The author has now revised the original edition to clear up a number of difficulties he and others have found in the original book.

Rawls aims to express an essential part of the common core of the democratic tradition--justice as fairness--and to provide an alternative to utilitarianism, which had dominated the Anglo-Saxon tradition of political thought since the nineteenth century. Rawls substitutes the ideal of the social contract as a more satisfactory account of the basic rights and liberties of citizens as free and equal persons. "Each person," writes Rawls, "possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override." Advancing the ideas of Rousseau, Kant, Emerson, and Lincoln, Rawls's theory is as powerful today as it was when first published.

Concerned primarily with oligopoly, this work includes a general study of pricing in three different markets—perfect competition, perfect monopoly, and imperfect competition. The solutions of these markets offered by Cournot, Smithies, Chamberlin, Stackelberg, Fellner, and Robinson are presented mathematically, followed by the author’s own version of the theory of rational pricing in oligopoly.

Previous authors have not allowed for all the variables arising from profit and price situations in the market. Here, more realistic assumptions and more complex analyses indicate that sellers in oligopoly situations do not always need to arrange specific agreements—hence, that “administered” pricing does not inevitably occur when the market is dominated by a few producers.

Chamberlain's classic work, now in its eighth edition, continues to influence the fundamental thinking of economists and businessmen, and for the best of reasons: It is a basic treatise in theory which, unlike traditional theories of “perfect competition,” deals with the economic world we live in, including both price and nonprice competition, oligopoly, various degrees of monopoly, “differentiated” products, advertising, etc. Its influence has spread extensively as well as intensively—to new theoretical problems, such as economic dynamics and development, and to the analysis of an increasingly wide range of the so-called “applied” fields.

In this eighth edition of The Theory of Monopolistic Competition Professor Chamberlain has added three new appendices: The Definition of Selling Costs; Numbers and Elasticities; and The Origin and Early Development of Monopolistic Competition Theory. The index has been extensively revised and expanded. In successive earlier editions the author compiled a bibliography of 1497 items. He also added a new treatment of the cost curve of the firm, discussing in particular some current misconceptions as to the role of the laws of proportions and of the divisibility of factors in relation to economics and diseconomies of scale, and advancing a broader theory which assigns to both proportions and scale their proper roles.

Karl N. Llewellyn was one of the founders and major figures of legal realism, and his many keen insights have a central place in American law and legal understanding. Key to Llewellyn’s thinking was his conception of rules, put forward in his numerous writings and most famously in his often mischaracterized declaration that they are “pretty playthings.” Previously unpublished, The Theory of Rules is the most cogent presentation of his profound and insightful thinking about the life of rules.

This book frames the development of Llewellyn’s thinking and describes the difference between what rules literally prescribe and what is actually done, with the gap explained by a complex array of practices, conventions, professional skills, and idiosyncrasies, most of which are devoted to achieving a law’s larger purpose rather than merely following the letter of a particular rule. Edited, annotated, and with an extensive analytic introduction by leading contemporary legal scholar Frederick Schauer, this rediscovered work contains material not found elsewhere in Llewellyn’s writings and will prove a valuable contribution to the existing literature on legal realism.

A leading psychologist explains why nearly all of us—including many of those who are persecuted and powerless—so often defend the social systems that cause misery and injustice.

Why do we so often defend the very social systems that are responsible for injustice and exploitation? In A Theory of System Justification, John Jost argues that we are motivated to defend the status quo because doing so serves fundamental psychological needs for certainty, security, and social acceptance. We want to feel good not only about ourselves and the groups to which we belong, but also about the overarching social structure in which we live, even when it hurts others and ourselves.

Jost lays out the wide range of evidence for his groundbreaking theory and examines its implications for our communities and our democracy. Drawing on twenty-five years of research, he provides an accessible account of system justification theory and its insights. System justification helps to explain deep contradictions, including the feeling among some women that they don’t deserve the same salaries as men and the tendency of some poor people to vote for policies that increase economic inequality.

The theory illuminates the most pressing social and political issues of our time—why has it been so hard to combat anthropogenic climate change?—as well as some of the most intimate—why do some black children prefer white dolls to black ones and why do some people stay in bad relationships? Jost’s theory has far-reaching implications, and he offers numerous insights that political activists and social justice advocates can use to promote change.

This collection examines the forces, both external and internal, that lead corporations to behave efficiently and to create wealth. Corporations vest control rights in shareholders, the author argues, because they are the constituency that bear business risk and therefore have the appropriate incentives to maximize corporate value. Assigning control to any other group would be tantamount to allowing that group to play poker with someone else's money, and would create inefficiencies. The implicit denial of this proposition is the fallacy of the so-called stakeholder theory of the corporation, which argues that corporations should be run in the interests of all stakeholders. This theory offers no account of how conflicts between different stakeholders are to be resolved, and gives managers no principle on which to base decisions, except to follow their own preferences.

In practice, shareholders delegate their control rights to a board of directors, who hire, fire, and set the compensation of the chief officers of the firm. However, because agents have different incentives than the principals they represent, they can destroy corporate value unless closely monitored. This happened in the 1960s and led to hostile takeovers in the market for corporate control in the 1970s and 1980s. The author argues that the takeover movement generated increases in corporate efficiency that exceeded $1.5 trillion and helped to lay the foundation for the great economic boom of the 1990s.

Christian Gauss Award Shortlist
Winner of the ASAP Book Prize
A Literary Hub Book of the Year

“Makes the case that the gimmick…is of tremendous critical value…Lies somewhere between critical theory and Sontag’s best work.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books

“Ngai exposes capitalism’s tricks in her mind-blowing study of the time- and labor-saving devices we call gimmicks.”
—New Statesman

“One of the most creative humanities scholars working today…My god, it’s so good.”
—Literary Hub

“Ngai is a keen analyst of overlooked or denigrated categories in art and life…Highly original.”
—4Columns

“It is undeniable that part of what makes Ngai’s analyses of aesthetic categories so appealing…is simply her capacity to speak about them brilliantly.”
—Bookforum

“A page turner.”
—American Literary History

Deeply objectionable and yet strangely attractive, the gimmick comes in many guises: a musical hook, a financial strategy, a striptease, a novel of ideas. Above all, acclaimed theorist Sianne Ngai argues, the gimmick strikes us both as working too little (a labor-saving trick) and working too hard (a strained effort to get our attention).

When we call something a gimmick, we register misgivings that suggest broader anxieties about value, money, and time, making the gimmick a hallmark of capitalism. With wit and critical precision, Ngai explores the extravagantly impoverished gimmick across a range of examples: the fiction of Thomas Mann, Helen DeWitt, and Henry James; the video art of Stan Douglas; the theoretical writings of Stanley Cavell and Theodor Adorno. Despite its status as cheap and compromised, the gimmick emerges as a surprisingly powerful tool in this formidable contribution to aesthetic theory.

What sort of thing is a lyric poem? An intense expression of subjective experience? The fictive speech of a specifiable persona? Theory of the Lyric reveals the limitations of these two conceptions of the lyric—the older Romantic model and the modern conception that has come to dominate the study of poetry—both of which neglect what is most striking and compelling in the lyric and falsify the long and rich tradition of the lyric in the West. Jonathan Culler explores alternative conceptions offered by this tradition, such as public discourse made authoritative by its rhythmical structures, and he constructs a more capacious model of the lyric that will help readers appreciate its range of possibilities.

“Theory of the Lyric brings Culler’s own earlier, more scattered interventions together with an eclectic selection from others’ work in service to what he identifies as a dominant need of the critical and pedagogical present: turning readers’ attention to lyric poems as verbal events, not fictions of impersonated speech. His fine, nuanced readings of particular poems and kinds of poems are crucial to his arguments. His observations on the workings of aspects of lyric across multiple different structures are the real strength of the book. It is a work of practical criticism that opens speculative vistas for poetics but always returns to poems.”
—Elizabeth Helsinger, Critical Theory

The novel is the most important form of Western art. It aims to represent the totality of life; it is the flagship that literature sends out against the systematic thought of science and philosophy. Indebted to Lukács and Bakhtin, to Auerbach and Ian Watt, Guido Mazzoni’s Theory of the Novel breaks new ground, building a historical understanding of how the novel became the modern book of life: one of the best representations of our experience of the world.

The genre arose during a long metamorphosis of narrative forms that took place between 1550 and 1800. By the nineteenth century it had come to encompass a corpus of texts distinguished by their freedom from traditional formal boundaries and by the particularity of their narratives. Mazzoni explains that modern novels consist of stories told in any way whatsoever, by narrators who exist—like us—as contingent beings within time and space. They therefore present an interpretation, not a copy, of the world.

Novels grant new importance to the stories of ordinary men and women and allow readers to step into other lives and other versions of truth. As Theory of the Novel makes clear, this art form narrates an epoch and a society in which individual experiences do not converge but proliferate, in which the common world has fragmented into a plurality of small, local worlds, each absolute in its particularity.

How much does a country's commercial policy affect its economic efficiency? How would free trade change the structure of a country’s economy and foreign trade? William Penfield Travis extends the Heckscher-Ohlin trade theory and addresses it to an empirical study of these and related questions. He argues that trade flows fail to reflect relative factor endowments because protection systematically nullifies their effects, and that therefore protection must be incorporated in any positive trade theory.

The author begins by developing a new concept—the equalization region—which he uses to reexamine the assumptions and the logic of the Heckscher-Ohlin theory and of its principal part, the factor-price equalization theorem. This analysis produces a fundamental reinterpretation of Leontief’s scarce-factor paradox, one which justifies Leontief’s work as an empirical test of trade theory under free trade which indicates its necessary modifications under protection. These modifications are then used to show that Leontief in fact measured the effects of American and foreign tariffs and other trade restriction on relative factor prices here and abroad.

To corroborate his theoretical analysis, Travis makes a detailed study of the commercial policies of five main industrial countries; he shows the common structure of protection and its systematic relationship to relative factor endowments. He shows also that protection, by distorting their relative prices, causes considerable substitution of raw materials for labor and capital inputs in manufacturing. The author concludes this important book by indicating some of the new forms which protection is taking throughout the world and by arguing that protection, past and present, is the main force preventing the spread of high living standards to the impoverished areas of the world.