scholarly journals How Public Managers Make Tradeoffs Regarding Lives: Evidence From a Flood Planning Survey Experiment

2020 ◽  
pp. 009539972094481
Author(s):  
Patrick S. Roberts ◽  
Lucia Velotti ◽  
Kris Wernstedt
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Local Government ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Works ◽  
Survey Experiment ◽  
City Managers ◽  
Public Managers ◽  
Flood Planning ◽  
Vignette Experiment

Public managers make decisions that may directly or indirectly affect the loss of human life, but there are few empirical analyses of whether and how public managers make tradeoffs among lives and other goods. We survey local government managers in the United States about tradeoffs using a vignette experiment with hypothetical flood scenarios. We find that managers make tradeoffs regarding lives saved compared with other features of the scenario, including project cost and property damage. Public works managers show a greater aversion to fatalities, while city managers and planners appear less averse. Our study also finds evidence of an equity preference.

A Comprehensive Review of the Evolution of Accounting Standards for State and Local Government Pensions and Other Postemployment Benefits in The United States

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-77
Author(s):  
Dale L. Flesher ◽  
Craig Foltin ◽  
Gary John Previts ◽  
Mary S. Stone
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Local Government ◽  
Accounting Standards ◽  
The United States ◽  
Pension Funds ◽  
Defined Benefit ◽  
Defined Contribution ◽  
Defined Contribution Plans ◽  
State And Local Government ◽  
State And Local

ABSTRACT Both the business media and the popular press have emphasized the underfunding problems associated with pension funds that are set aside for state and local government workers, a group that also includes teachers and professors at state-affiliated colleges and universities. The realization that pension funds are typically underfunded stems from the fact that the accounting standards associated with state and local government employee pension funds have led to greater transparency since 2011. This paper examines, explains, and interprets the historical development over the last 70 years of accounting standards for state and local government pension funds in the United States. Changing accounting standards, along with economic and social change, have led to consequences such as employers transforming their pension programs to avoid substantial costs and significant liabilities, for example by changing from defined benefit to defined contribution plans.

Comment

1980 ◽  
Vol 2 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 108-109
Author(s):  
Mark Kesselman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Local Government ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
The United States ◽  
State Governments ◽  
Local Autonomy ◽  
Fundamental Change ◽  
Local Expenditures

Acentral ingredient of democracy in the United States, according to Tocqueville, was local autonomy – yet the data presented by Professor Austin suggests a fundamental change in the United States since Tocquevilles time. Most local expenditures are now provided by the federal and state governments, most “local” programs are not local at all, for many (if not most) purposes the local government has become an extension of the federal government, and it is often replaced altogether by federally created field agencies (what the French call deconcentrated administration).

A View from Inside: Understanding Puerto Rico Cockfighting

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
Úrsula A. Aragunde-Kohl ◽  
Yahaira Segarra-González ◽  
Liza M. Meléndez-Samó ◽  
Ivemarie Hernández-Rivera ◽  
Carolina Quiles-Peña
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Puerto Rico ◽  
Local Government ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Qualitative Data ◽  
The United States ◽  
Second Phase ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
The Third ◽  
The People

Abstract The purpose of this research was to better understand the beliefs and practices that the residents of Puerto Rico have regarding cockfighting, including their perception of the recently passed prohibition against nonhuman animal fighting on the island. It had an exploratory descriptive design consisting of three phases, where the qualitative data obtained from phase one would guide the process of identifying variables that could be measured. In the second phase, an instrument was developed, and in the third, it was administered. Most of the participants agreed with the prohibition of cockfighting in Puerto Rico and that it was necessary. The data showed that there is a disconnect between what the federal government of the United States legislated, what the local government and agencies that were supposed to enforce the prohibition did with the legislation, and what the people directly affected by the legislation received for education and guidance.

scholarly journals Cosmopolitanism, Translocality, Astronoetics: A Multi-Local Vantage Point

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 29-38
Author(s):  
Gabriela Vargas-Cetina ◽  
Manpreet Kaur Kang
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Special Volume ◽  
Multiple Flows ◽  
The World ◽  
Shed Light

The world in which we live is crisscrossed by multiple flows of people, information, non-human life, travel circuits and goods. At least since the Sixteenth Century, the Americas have received and generated new social, cultural and product trends. As we see through the case studies presented here, modern literature and dance, the industrialization of food and the race to space cannot be historicized without considering the role the Americas, and particularly the United States, have played in all of them. We also see, at the same time, how these flows of thought, art, science and products emerged from sources outside the Americas to then take root in and beyond the United States. The authors in this special volume are devising conceptual tools to analyze this multiplicity across continents and also at the level of particular nations and localities. Concepts such as cosmopolitanism, translocality and astronoetics are brought to shed light on these complex crossings, giving us new ways to look at the intricacy of these distance-crossing flows. India, perhaps surprisingly, emerges as an important cultural interlocutor, beginning with the idealized, imagined versions of Indian spirituality that fueled the romanticism of the New England Transcendentalists, to the importance of Indian dance pioneers in the world stage during the first part of the twentieth century and the current importance of India as a player in the race to space. 

scholarly journals Beyond the Psychological Wage: Du Bois on White Dominion

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ella Myers
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Historical Fact ◽  
The Universe

W.E.B. Du Bois’s reading of whiteness as a “public and psychological wage” is enormously influential. This essay examines another, lesser known facet of Du Bois’s account of racialized identity: his conceptualization of whiteness as dominion. In his 1920–1940 writings, “modern” whiteness appears as a proprietary orientation toward the planet in general and toward “darker peoples” in particular. This “title to the universe” is part of chattel slavery’s uneven afterlife, in which the historical fact of “propertized human life” endures as a racialized ethos of ownership. The essay examines how this “title” is expressed and reinforced in the twentieth century by the Jim Crow system of racial signs in the United States and by violent “colonial aggrandizement” worldwide. The analytic of white dominion, I argue, allows Du Bois to productively link phenomena often regarded as discrete, namely, domestic and global forms of white supremacy and practices of exploitation and dispossession. Ultimately, the entitlement Du Bois associates with whiteness is best understood as a pervasive, taken-for-granted horizon of perception, which facilitates the transaction of the “wage” but is not reducible to it.

A descriptive case study of effective decision-making of a local government organization in the United States of America

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 279-297
Author(s):  
Jennifer Capler
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Local Government ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
The United States ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Government Organizations ◽  
Effective Decision ◽  
Effective Decision Making

PurposeThis article details a qualitative descriptive case study of affective factors of effective decision-making of one local government organization in the United States of America. The specific problem was that many elected American local government representatives lack effective decision-making strategies. This research focus indicated a lack of qualitative research on the real-world experience of factors that were taken into consideration during decision-making within American local government organizations.Design/methodology/approachUsing a local government organization in southwest Illinois, elected representatives were interviewed and observed. The interviews and observations surfaced how the representatives made decisions. Data were analyzed using manual coding and theming to determine themes and patterns.FindingsThe results produced six themes about factors, including emotional intelligence, which impacted decision-making. They are: (1) remembering the past, (2) communication and respect, (3) spurring economic growth and development, (4) fairness, (5) recognizing and removing emotions and bias and (6) accountability.Research limitations/implicationsBeing a single case study, this research is limited in generalization. The research was limited to the identification of current, real-world experience of elected local government representatives.Practical implicationsThe findings of this research can be used to create more effective decision-making practices for local government organizations of similar size.Originality/valueThis is the first study to review, in-depth, the decision-making and emotional intelligence factors of local government organizations in the United States of America. The conceptual background, discussion, implications to local government organizations, limitations and recommendations for future studies are discussed.

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