Orientalism Reconsidered: Peter Duignan,Lewis Gann,Edward Said,and the Rebirth of Imperialism

Book reviewed in this article: culture and Imperialism: Edward W. Said The Rebirth of the West: Culture, Politics and Society 7 945–1958: Peter Duignan and L. H. Gann     

Contextualizing Welfare's Work Disincentive: The Case of Female-headed Family Poverty

The conventional model of the relationship between welfare incentives and poverty rates holds that welfare payments produce an income-enhancement effect that removes families from poverty until some threshold. Beyond this point increased payments engender a work-disincentive effect resulting in increased rates of poverty. We challenge the model's assumption that poverty levels are a simple and spatially invariant response to welfare incentives, contending instead that local employment conditions may substantially alter the relation. Our reformulation of the conventional modeling approach is based on the expansion method. Specifically, we extend the model to include the effects of local labor-market conditions on the response of poverty levels to welfare incentives. In contesting the invariance assumption, the expansion method allows us to determine where and in what contexts welfare is “work discouraging.” The empirical analysis, which is undertaken at the county level, indicates that welfare payments vary in their influence on poverty rates across different employment contexts. A national map portraying this parameter instability demonstrates that female-family poverty rates are most responsive to welfare assistance in the rural South and least responsive in the metropolitan Northeast. Finally, we examine two sharply contrasting locales to illustrate how poverty is governed by specific employment and welfare characteristics.     

‘Invisible Government’ and Intelligence Crusaders: Three Cold War Espionage Biographies

Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994. 641 pp. $51.00 (cloth).

Oleg Kalugin, Spy Master: My 32 Years in Intelligence and Espionage Against the West. London: Smith Gryphon, 1995. 375 pp. $19.95 (paper).

Oleg Gordievsky, Next Stop Execution. London: Macmillan, 1995. 404 pp. No price given.     

Apartment Rents: Another Challenge to the Monocentric Model

Extension of hedonic modeling strategy to the case of apartment rents in the Dallas region reveals the influence of a complex network of activity centers and highway axes. Nodes other than the CBD exert greater influence on rents than the CBD and amenity variables and externalities have both positive and negative effects. These findings demand reevaluation of the place normally assigned to higher-density rental housing in urban models.     

Employment Dynamics,Spatial Restructuring,and the Business Cycle

The multinodal metropolis is an evolving system, affected by both long-term restructuring and by business cycle dynamics. This study of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex points, first, to the multiplicity and wide dispersion of employment centers within the region and, second, to the importance of vintage. During business cycle upswings new centers in new and more dispersed locations receive the preponderant share of new growth. During business cycle downswings, old activities are pruned most heavily from old locations. The result is an increasingly complex array of specialized agglomerations.