HOW WELL DID PAST UN POPULATION PROJECTIONS ANTICIPATE DEMOGRAPHIC TRENDS IN SIX SOUTH-EAST ASIAN COUNTRIES?

This paper analyses the accuracy of the United Nations’ population projections since the late 1950s for six South-east Asian countries: Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. The study uses available projected and estimated age-structured data as well as published assumptions on fertility and mortality trends. A decomposition of the total projection errors into base errors (wrong estimates of demographic conditions at the beginning of projection interval) and change errors (wrong assumptions about the trends) shows that the base errors have generally been decreasing over time presumably as a consequence of improving demographic monitoring systems. The change errors, however, do not seem to decline over time. This seems to be due to a number of country-specific cultural and political factors whose effect was not anticipated as well as to a lack of good theories with predictive power. These findings suggest the need to give more explicit attention to the treatment of uncertainty in future population projections.     

“We Seem to Have Always Spoken in Prose . . .” Policy Analysis Is a Clinical Profession: Implications for Policy Analysis Practice and Instruction

The purpose of this article is (i) to propose the concept of policy analysis as a clinical profession, (ii) to relate to the clinical intellectual processes involved in policy analysis, and (iii) following studies in other clinical disciplines, to infer implications for policy analysis and policy analysis instruction. The article will highlight notions of clinical reasoning and clinical cognitive processes relevant to policy analysis and will address reasoning errors associated with bounded rationality and uncertainty in the clinical analytic process. The article seeks to promote awareness of clinical notions and of their relevance for policy analysis practice and instruction.     

A historical review of investigations on laterality of emotions in the human brain

Different models of emotional lateralization, advanced since the first clinical observations raised this issue, will be reviewed following their historical progression. The clinical investigations that have suggested a general dominance of the right hemisphere for all kinds of emotions and the experimental studies that have proposed a different hemispheric specialization for positive vs. negative emotions (valence hypothesis) or for approach vs. withdrawal tendencies (motivational hypothesis) will be reviewed first and extensively. This historical review will be followed by a short discussion of recent anatomo-clinical and activation studies that have investigated (a) emotional and behavioral disorders of patients with asymmetrical forms of fronto-temporal degeneration and (b) laterality effects in specific brain structures (amygdala, ventro-medial prefrontal cortex, and anterior insula) playing a critical role in different components of emotions. Overall, these studies support the hypothesis of a right hemisphere dominance for all components of the emotional system.     

Multiple agents,blame games and public policy-making: the case of local government reform in New South Wales

Politicians often use ‘independent experts’ to avoid blame for contentious public policy. The use of multiple agents, however, has attracted relatively little attention. We extend the blame-avoidance literature to identify additional opportunities and risks that arise when multiple agents are used to support/oppose particular public policies. We then test our propositions using evidence from recent local government reforms in New South Wales. The picture which emerges is largely one of confusion whereby independent agents provide contradictory opinions, attempt to shift blame to one another, and dispute interpretations of earlier advice. We conclude our analysis with a discussion of the salient factors for successful pursuit of the multiple-agent variant of the blame games.     

UNCERTAINTY AND THE HISTORY OF IDEAS

Intellectual historians often make empirical claims, but can never know for certain if these claims are right. Uncertainty is thus inevitable for intellectual historians. But accepting uncertainty is not enough: we should also act on it, by trying to reduce and report it. We can reduce uncertainty by amassing valid data from different sources to weigh the strengths and weaknesses of competing explanations, rather than trying to “prove” an empirical claim by looking for evidence that fits it. Then we should report our degree of certainty in our claims. When we answer empirical questions in intellectual history, we are not telling our readers what happened: we are telling them how strong we think our evidence is—a crucial shift of emphasis. For intellectual historians, then, uncertainty is subjective, as discussed by Keynes and Collingwood; the paper thus explores three differences between subjective and objective uncertainty. Having outlined the theoretical basis of uncertainty, the paper then offers examples from actual research: Noel Malcolm's work shows how to reduce and report uncertainty about composition, and David Wootton's work shows how to reduce and report uncertainty about beliefs.     

Youth as a metaphor: an interview with Carmen Leccardi

Abstract

What are the specificities of youth in Italy as a group? How are they received in civil society and beyond? What kind of approaches have characterized the study of youth in Italy throughout the last decades? In this interview, the editors of this Special Issue open a conversation with Carmen Leccardi, a leading scholar in the field whose work has impacted the study of Italian youth not only in Italy but also internationally. Leccardi investigates these issues diachronically, following and commenting some salient aspects of Italian history that have had an impact on how the lives of young people have unfolded, among them social movements, policies and labour market fluctuations. Revisiting and updating the notion of uncertainty in young people’s lives, the interview concludes that youth can be considered as a metaphor particularly able to capture contemporary social changes.     

Human capital accumulation and long‐term income growth projections for European regions

We propose an econometric framework to construct projections for per capita income growth and human capital for European regions. Using Bayesian methods, our approach accounts for model uncertainty in terms of the choice of explanatory variables, the nature of spatial spillovers, as well as the potential endogeneity between output growth and human capital accumulation. This method allows us to assess the potential contribution of future educational attainment to economic growth and income convergence among European regions over the next decades. Our findings suggest that income convergence dynamics and human capital act as important drivers of income growth for the decades to come.     

Knowledge, uncertainty and physical geography: towards the development of methodologies for questioning belief

Although it is widely acknowledged that our understanding of environmental systems cannot be reduced to single predictions and unique explanations, determinism remains a common strategy in physical geography. This paper argues for explicit assessments of uncertainty in environmental data and models as a necessary, although not a sufficient, condition for balancing uncertain scientific arguments against uncertain social, ethical, moral and legal arguments in managing environmental systems. In particular, this paper aims to: (1) demonstrate the importance of assessing uncertainty within a realist research framework; (2) consider the nature of scientific uncertainty as the basis for developing methodologies that question belief; and (3) explore some important aspects of a methodology for evaluating uncertainties in environmental research.