Culture, Morality, and Economics in Reef Management by Local Communities

Regular host Dr Mark Fabian is joined by episode guest Dr Stefania Fiorentino, senior teaching associate in planning, growth, and urban regeneration at Cambridge university’s department of land economy. Dr Fiorentino’s research is at the intersection of urban planning and local economic development, specifically how to innovate with respect to the inclusivity and effectiveness of urban regeneration strategies. Her research is extremely impact-oriented and is typically conducted in partnership with communities, developers, and local government. She has worked especially on coastal towns in the UK, and also has papers on densification strategies, industrial clusters, the geography of innovation, and regional inequalities. The conversation ranges from left behind places to gentrification and strategies for participatory governance.

Stefania’s webpage and papers:

https://www.landecon.cam.ac.uk/directory/dr-stefania-fiorentino

Fiorentino, S., Glasmeier, A. K., Lobao, L., Martin, R., and Tyler, P. (2023) ‘Left behind places’: what are they and why do they matter?, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsad044 

Fiorentino, S., Sielker, F., and Tomaney, J. (2023) Coastal towns as ‘left-behind places’: economy, environment and planning, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsad045 

Fiorentino, S. (2023) Public-led shared workspaces and the intangible factors of urban regeneration in UK coastal towns, Urban, Planning and Transport Research, 11(1), DOI: 10.1080/21650020.2023.2260853 

Fiorentino et al. (2022) The future of the corporate office? Emerging trends in the post-Covid city, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 15(3), 597–614, https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsac027

Regular host Dr Mark Fabian is joined by Dr Jacqui Lau, senior lecturer and discovery early career fellow (DECRA) at James Cook University in Australia. Jacqui is an environmental scientist employing interdisciplinary perspectives and mixed methods to understand how coastal communities in the pacific islands and Australia respond to climate change and environmental transformations. She has worked collaboratively in the Pacific, East and West Africa to examine ecosystem services, the impact of shocks like COVID-19 on coastal communities, perceptions of fairness about the customary management of coral reefs, and issues of equity (including gender) in conservation and climate change policy. Her work has been published in Nature Climate Change, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and World Development, among other top outlets. 

Jacqui’s website: https://research.jcu.edu.au/portfolio/jacqueline.lau/ 

Ostrom, E. (2009). A general framework for analysing the sustainability of social-ecological systems. Nature, 325(5939): 419–422. https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.1172133 

Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge University Press. 

Sayer, A. (2011). Why things matter to people: Social science, values, and ethical life. Cambridge University Press. 

Graham, J., Haidt, J., Koleva, S., Motyl, M., Iyer, R., Wojcik, S. & Ditto, P. (2013). Moral foundations theory: The pragmatic validity of moral pluralism. Advances in Applied Experimental Philosophy, 47(1): 55–130. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780124072367000024? 

See also Haidt, J. The Righteous Mind: Why good people are divided on politics and religion. Penguin.

Shark’s Pacific and Dr Jess Cramp: https://sharkspacific.org/about/  

‘Copaganda’ is the name given to media that seeks to portray the police in a favourable, often distorted light. This includes fictional shows like Law and Order, CSI: Crime Scene Investigations, and Miami Vice, as well as reality-TV style shows that follow policy officers around as they go about their business. Emma Rackstraw’s research investigates how these shows affect the behaviour of the police, perceptions of the police among viewers, and attitudes towards the police in the communities where these shows take place. She joins regular ePODstemology host Dr Mark Fabian from the University of Warwick to discuss the implications of copaganda for criminal justice reform in the United States, the role that researchers play in skewing policy analysis for good or ill, and what changes are most urgently needed in US criminal justice policy.   

Emma’s website:

https://www.emmarackstraw.com/home

Emma’s job market paper: 

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4592803 

“The Work” documentary (typically available via Amazon Prime):

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5836866/ 

Public health approaches to policing: 

https://www.intensiveengagement.com/uploads/3/2/8/3/3283498/public_health_approaches.pdf 

Climate change is the biggest existential threat facing humanity. So why aren’t we doing more about it? This week’s guest is Dr Antonio Valentim, a political scientist and postdoctoral fellow at Yale’s MacMillan Centre. His research seeks to answer two main questions 1) when and why do voters change their opinions and behaviours with respect to climate change? and 2) how do political incentives influence political elites’ behaviour on climate change? Who better to help us get some answer on how we can get more action on the climate policy front. If you’re interested in what protesters, citizens, political parties, and researchers can do to advance the climate transition, tune into this episode. 

Antonio’s website: https://antoniovalentim.github.io/

Antonio’s paper on Fridays for Future protests: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/m6dpg/ 

Antonio’s paper on the Green’s not fielding candidates in flood affected areas: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3960045 

Bolet, D., Green ,F., & Gonzalez-Eguino, M. (2023). How to get coal country to vote for climate policy: The effect of a ‘just transition agreement’ on Spanish election results. Forthcoming in American Political Science Review. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4394195 

While Kim Jong Un might disagreed, democracy is widely regarded as a universal value – it is a system of political organisation that enshrines the right to self-determination. Recent centuries have seen a wave of democratisation relative to historical trends, with democracies replacing dictatorships and other autocratic forms of governance in nations across the globe. Yet many of these democracies have also struggled to put down strong roots. Backsliding is common and consolidation arduous. A few spots of bad luck and a fledging democracy like Bangladesh or even Hungary can start to look fake. How can we promote the maturation of democracies? Samuel Amin from the University of Warwick joins regular host Dr Mark Fabian to share his insights from his PhD research on Ghana, especially the role of the national peace council there. Samuel emphasises the role of institutions in democratic consolidation, and that many of these institutions will be specific to local contexts rather than universally useful models that can be exported to other countries. The national peace council, for example, makes use of cultural narratives of Ghanaians as peaceful people, and norms of respecting religious and ethnic elders, to facilitate conflict resolution and respect for liberal-democratic institutions like courts and the electoral commission. The episode is optimistic and hopeful, with Samuel concluding with some positive thoughts about the future of democracy in West Africa.

Samuel’s student page at Warwick: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/people/anim/ 

Follow Sam on twitter: @animksam

Nick Cheeseman’s Democracy in Africa: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/democracy-in-africa/3FFB8B40059192D449B77A402ADC82A1 

Kate Baldwin’s book on traditional African chiefs in democratic africa: https://politicalscience.yale.edu/publications/paradox-traditional-chiefs-democratic-africa   

Dominique Burbidge’s papers on East African democracy: https://law.strathmore.edu/dr-dominic-burbidge/ 

Lisa Weeden’s book Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power, and Performance in Yemen: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo5893513.html 

One way to think about what makes *social* science distinct is that it is trying to study subjects, not objects. Subjects have feelings, opinions, and values, which are often hard to observe and even harder to measure. Subjects’ behaviour is also often endogenous to being studied. For example, the ‘shy conservative’ phenomenon refers to the observation that people often lie about their right wing and traditionalist beliefs when responding to political polling. Finally, subjects are embedded in social structures that they both create and are created by. And those structures change rapidly! Talk about a hard challenge.  One thing holding social science back is the shallow understanding of the philosophy of social science among social scientists. Well ePODstemology strives to be different! This week’s guest is Dr Cristian Larroulet Philippi from the University of Cambridge, who joins regular host Dr Mark Fabian from the University of Warwick to discuss the challenges of measuring the human. A key theme of the episode is that ‘physics envy’ is a poor way for social to proceed, but perhaps seismology provides a better template?

Cristian’s webpage: https://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/directory/larrouletphilippi 

Some background on Kitcher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Kitcher

More information on life satisfaction scales: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-021-00460-8 

Depression scales: https://www.apa.org/depression-guideline/assessment 

Inventing temperature (the history of thermometers) by Ha-Sook Chang: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/inventing-temperature-9780195337389

Eran Tal on measurement: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/measurement-science/ 

Regular host Dr Mark Fabian from the University of Warwick is joined by Dr Malte Dold, assistant professor of economics at Pomona College. Malte is one of the most prominent scholars in the field of behavioural welfare economics, which sits at the intersection of economics, philosophy, and psychology. You might have heard of behavioural economics, which inspired the idea of nudges in public policy – little tweaks to the choice environment citizens face as they navigate the world that can help them towards the decisions they would ideally like to make. Piano key stairs that play music to encourage you to walk rather than take the escalator. Being defaulted into a high savings-rate retirement plan by your employer. Or Timely and easy to action reminders from the tax office encouraging you to pay your bills. All nudges. If you think these are all bullshit, try navigating a budget airline’s website without paying for any additional extras. Here behavioural insights from psychology are used against to wear you down and encourage you to hand over cash for things you don’t need. Behavioural welfare economics is the philosophical side of these interventions. When we use nudges and other similar interventions to help people, how do we understand what is good for them? Economics would traditional use people’s own preferences as a measure of their welfare. But one of the main contributions of behavioural economics research has been to demonstrate that people’s preferences are often unstable, unclear, context sensitive, constructed on the spot, and otherwise a poor guide to their welfare. So how should economists, psychologists, and policymakers proceed? Tune in to find out. 

Malte's website:
https://www.maltedold.com/

Angner, E. We're all behavioural economists now. Journal of Economic Methodology, 26(3): 195-207. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1350178X.2019.1625210

Kahneman, D. & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica., 47(2): 263 -292.

Kuhn on scientific revolutions:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/

Lakatos on scientific revolutions:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lakatos/

Chetty, R. (2015). Behavioural economics and public policy: A pragmatic perspective. American Economic Review Papers & Proceedings, 105(5): 1-33.
https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/34330194/behavioral_ely.pdf

Smith, V. (1962). An experimental study of competitive market behaviour. Journal of Political Economy, 70(2): 111-137.
https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1027&context=economics_articles

Bernheim, D. (2008). Behavioural welfare economics. NBER Working Paper 14622. https://www.nber.org/papers/w14622

Sugden, R. (2018). The Community of Advantage: A behavioural economist's defence of the market. Oxford University Press.
https://academic.oup.com/book/10329

Sugden, R. (2021). Normative economics without preferences. International Review of Economics, 68(1): 5-19.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12232-020-00356-8

Chater, N. & Loewenstein, G. (2022). The i-frame and the s-frame: How focusing on individual-level solutions has led behavioural public policy astray. Online first in Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 1-60.

Francis, D. V., Hardy, B. L., Jones, D. (2022). Black economists on race and policy: Contributions to education, poverty, and mobility, and public finance. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 60(2): 454-493.
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jel.20211686

Gneezy, U. (2020). A fine is a price. The Journal of Legal Studies, 29(1): 1-17.   
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/468061

Nudge by Thaler & Sunstein:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Nudge-Improvin

Raffaella Taylor-Seymour is an anthropologist and Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life at Columbia University. Her work examines religious transformations in the context of struggles over gender, sexuality, and the environment in contemporary Zimbabwe. This is a context in which colonization violently upended ideas about personhood, spirituality, and ties between people and place. Raffaella’s work explores how young people navigate a religious landscape that has shifted ever since, and how they devise new forms of spiritual practice. As we discuss in this episode, the experiences of young Zimbabweans in this regard are instructive for people in the global North, especially with respect to how we relate to our ancestors, meaning in life, and cultural power. As the systems of value that made sense of life after World War II come unstuck, a rift is growing between older, more traditional generations, and younger generations who yearn for a different world. There is much that we can learn from Anthropology with respect to navigating this mileau, and Raffaella distils some of this wisdom in conversation with regular host Mark Fabian from the University of Warwick.   

Inequality is a perennial subject of politics, a foundational element of economic welfare analysis, and one of the central subjects of sociology. In this episode, Dr Marco Ranaldi from University College London joins regular host Dr Mark Fabian from the University of Warwick to discuss what's new in inequality research. A central topic is Ranaldi's innovative new concept of compositional inequality, which compares the income of the top and bottom of the distribution in terms of whether that income is derived from labour or capital. The implications of compositional inequality for political economy are significant. What else is new is trends in global capitalism, especially the rise of China's middle class, the advent of artificial intelligence, superannuation funds and real estate assets making middle class boomers the new owners of the means of production, and the reluctance of states to tax inefficiently. 

Marco's personal website with all his publications:
https://www.mranaldi.com/

A brief explainer of compositional inequality:
https://www.mranaldi.com/ici

Tony Atkinson's Inequality: What Can Be Done, Harvard University Press: https://www.tony-atkinson.com/new-book-inequality-what-can-be-done/

Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century, Harvard University Press: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X

Joseph Stiglitz's The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future, W. W. Norton: https://wwnorton.com/books/the-price-of-inequality/

Heather Boushey's Unbound: How Inequality Constricts Our Economy and What We Can Do About It, Harvard University Press: https://equitablegrowth.org/unbound-how-inequality-constricts-our-economy-and-what-we-can-do-about-it/

Francois Bourguignon's The Globalization of Inequality, Princeton University Press: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691160528/the-globalization-of-inequality

A taste of the content in The Spirit Level Delusion: Fact Checking the Left's New Theory of Everything, by Christopher Snowden:
https://spiritleveldelusion.blogspot.com/

Political economists from Goldsmith's London on the domestic regime (i.e. the low interest rate coalition between home owners and hedge funds): https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/how-covid-19-revealed-the-politics-of-our-economy/ 

Workplace wellbeing kicked off in Silicon valley with ping pong tables, bean bags, and on 'campus' Michellin star restaurants. With Google, Facebook, Amazon et al. raking in the dollars, it wasn't long before other companies were exploring the theme themselves. Some of the outcomes seem sinister: employers encouraging you to see the firm as your family, your work as making a difference to the world, and you mental health as something to make resilient, but mostly so that they can squeeze more productivity out of you. Deeper issues like autonomy, culture, and relationships seem missing from the rhetoric. But not from the scholarship! In th bumper 90-minute episode, regular host Dr Mark Fabian from the University of Warwick is joined by Nina Jordan from Cambridge University and Cherise Regier and Will Fleming from Oxford University to discuss the latest research on workplace wellbeing, from the 4-day work week to worker voice and industrial relations policy. We even discuss the prospects for workplace wellbeing under capitalism. 

Cherise's personal webpage: https://www.spi.ox.ac.uk/people/cherise-regier

Will's personal webpage: https://wellbeing.hmc.ox.ac.uk/people/will-fleming

Nina's personal webpage: https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/about-us/person/nina-jorden/

Nikolova, M. and Cnossen, F. (2020). What makes work meaningful and why economists should care about it. Labour Economics. https://docs.iza.org/dp13112.pdf

Budd, John, W. (2011). The Thought of Work. Cornell University Press: https://www.amazon.com/Thought-Work-Cornell-Paperbacks/dp/0801477611

Sharif, M. A., Mogliner, C., and Herschfield, H. E. (2021). Having too little or too much time is linked to lower subjective well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/psp-pspp0000391.pdf

OECD (2013). Guidelines on measuring subjective wellbeing. https://www.oecd.org/wise/oecd-guidelines-on-measuring-subjective-well-being-9789264191655-en.htm

Fabian, M. (2022). A theory of subjective wellbeing. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-theory-of-subjective-wellbeing-9780197635261?cc=gb&lang=en&

Alexandrova, A. (2017). A philosophy for the science of wellbeing. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-philosophy-for-the-science-of-well-being-9780199300518?cc=gb&lang=en&

Luc Boltanski & Laurent Thevenot, On Justification: Economies of Worth. https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691125169/on-justification

Argument that capitalism is about shifting returns to production towards capital: https://markfabian.blogspot.com/2020/09/what-is-capitalism.html