POPULATION ANALYSIS ON THE MICROCOMPUTER: A SYSTEM OF SOFTWARE PACKAGES

This paper describes a system of versatile software packages that has been developed by the author for population analysis on IBM-compatible microcomputers using PC or MS DOS. The series includes programs for the production of life tables, the analysis of spatial patterns and temporal trends in mortality, population projections, stationary-state population simulations and demographic planning, cohort survival estimates of net migration, and the analysis of migration matrices. Each of the programs in the series is discussed in terms of its principal analytical features, associated conceptual and methodological issues, and potential applications. The programs are intended for use both as basic research and planning tools and as instructional aids in university-level courses. The programs and related documentation are available on a set of four 360K diskettes.     

Between friendship and justice: on Lincoln’s political thought

Reading Aristotle and applying his notion of philia, or political friendship, across 26 centuries sheds significant light into Abraham Lincoln’s career. It is precisely in Lincoln’s embodiment of the Aristotelian notion of friendship that we come to understand his unique greatness. Perhaps he alone of all Americans proved capable of such extraordinary feats as leading the Republican party to victory in 1860, holding the Union together through the secession crisis and four long years of bloody civil war, ending slavery without white backlash, and offering reconciliation with the incredible magnanimity expressed in the ringing phrases of the Second Inaugural address. The basis of Lincoln’s preternatural political genius proved to be his ability to comprehend all sides, a comprehension that can only come from a profound belief in the importance of friendship. Americans, Lincoln argued throughout a terrible war as he had his entire life, were not enemies but friends who shared a commitment to nature and nature’s law as expressed in the Declaration.     

Enforcing Emissions Trading Programs

Combining an analysis of the compliance incentives faced by firms in an emissions trading program, a comprehensive review of the enforcement strategies employed in Sulfur Dioxide Allowance and the Regional Clean Air Incentives Market (RECLAIM) programs, and a review of the compliance performance of these programs thus far, we are able to propose several practical guidelines for enforcing emissions trading programs. We stress the importance of prevailing market prices for emissions permits in determining compliance incentives, the importance of accurately measuring firms' emissions, and the importance of implementing enforcement strategies that remove the incentives firms may have to falsify emissions reports.     

Consuming Ethics: Articulating the Subjects and Spaces of Ethical Consumption

Geography's debates about how to maintain a sense of morally responsible action often emphasise the problematic nature of caring at a distance, and take for granted particular kinds of moral selfhood in which responsibility is bound into notions of human agency that emphasise knowledge and recognition. Taking commodity consumption as a field in which the ethics, morality, and politics of responsibility has been problematised, we argue that existing research on consumption fails to register the full complexity of the practices, motivations and mechanisms through which the working-up of moral selves is undertaken in relation to consumption practices. Rather than assuming that ethical decision‐making works through the rational calculation of obligations, we conceptualise the emergence of ethical consumption as ways in which everyday practical moral dispositions are re‐articulated by policies, campaigns and practices that enlist ordinary people into broader projects of social change. Ethical consumption, then, involves both a governing of consumption and a governing of the consuming self. Using the example of Traidcraft , we present a detailed examination of one particular context in which self‐consciously ethical consumption is mediated, suggesting that ethical consumption can be understood as opening up ethical and political considerations in new combinations. We therefore argue for the importance of the growth of ethical consumption as a new terrain of political action, while also emphasising the grounds upon which ethical consumption can be opened up to normative critique.