Public Policy as if Women Mattered

Abstract People exploit flexibility in mental accounting to relax psychological constraints on spending. Four studies demonstrate this in the context of moral behavior. The first study replicates prior findings that people donate more money to charity when they earned it through unethical versus ethical means. However, when the unethically-earned money is first “laundered”––the cash is physically exchanged for the same amount but from a different arbitrary source—people spent it as if it was earned ethically. This mental money laundering represents an extreme violation of fungibility. The second study demonstrates that mental money laundering generalizes to cases in which ethically and unethically earned money are mixed. When gains from ethical and unethical sources were pooled, people spent the entire pooled sum as if it was ethically earned. The last two studies provide mixed support for the prediction that people actively seek out laundering opportunities for unethically earned money, suggesting partial sophistication about these effects. These findings provide new evidence for the ease with which people can rationalize misbehavior, and have implications for consumer choice, corporate behavior and public policy.

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Public policy as if women mattered: Improving the child support system for women on AFDC

Journal of Women Politics & Policy ◽

10.1080/1554477x.1997.9970775 ◽

1997 ◽

Vol 17 (1) ◽

pp. 1-26 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Jyl Josephson

Keyword(s):

Public Policy ◽

Support System ◽

Child Support ◽

As If

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Methodological collectivism: social science and social policy

Thinking Collectively ◽

10.1332/policypress/9781447346890.003.0002 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 23-36

Author(s):

Paul Spicker

Keyword(s):

Public Policy ◽

Social Policy ◽

Social Science ◽

Ethnic Groups ◽

Methodological Collectivism ◽

As If

Methodological collectivism looks for explanations and patterns of behaviour not in the actions of individuals, but in the actions of groups - including classes, ethnic groups and societies taken as a whole. It extends beyond groups, however, to categories or blocs of people, treating them as if they can be understood in collective terms. This is the characteristic approach of sociology, but it also has an important pragmatic purpose in the development of public policy.

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Public Policy in the Conflict of Laws: a Chinese Wall around Little England?

International and Comparative Law Quarterly ◽

10.1017/s0020589300059388 ◽

1996 ◽

Vol 45 (3) ◽

pp. 633-661 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Nelson Enonchong

Keyword(s):

Public Policy ◽

International Law ◽

Common Law ◽

Private International Law ◽

Conflict Of Laws ◽

Foreign Law ◽

The World ◽

The Common ◽

As If

The English courts have often incurred the reproach of undue insularity in their attitude to foreign law.1 A common gripe is that they have failed to recognise that there is a world elsewhere, and that England is not “a legal island”.2 Savigny, we are told,3 was moved to lament over the fact that although in other branches of knowledge there was an internationalist outlook in England, in the field of jurisprudence alone it “remained divided from the rest of the world, as if by a Chinese wall”. Recently it has been suggested that “The foundation of this Chinese wall… lay … in an unquestioning belief in the superiority of the common law and its institutions, at least in England.”4 It would be unsafe to affirm that the charge of insularity has always been without foundation. The “Little England”5 attitude of mind, Roskill LJ reminds us,6 was “once proclaimed in the phrase ‘Athanasius contra mundum’”. And it should occasion no surprise that the examples commonly advanced to substantiate the charge are usually drawn from private international law.7

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Understanding the Issues

10.1093/oso/9780190873363.003.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Hugh Lafollette

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Public Policy ◽

Twentieth Century ◽

Real Options ◽

The United States ◽

Gun Control ◽

Moral Judgments ◽

Special Role ◽

History Of ◽

As If

The gun control debate is often cast as if there were two options: we either have it or we don’t. This is a mistake. Our real options lie along five different, albeit overlapping, continua. The first three concern public policy: who should be permitted to have which firearms, and how should we regulate the guns we permit people to have. The fourth and fifth continua concern prudential and moral judgments: whether it would be wise or moral for people to own firearms independently of the how we answer the policy questions. I outline the history of firearms from their inception into the early twentieth century. I explain when and where they were initially used, how they were refined and developed, and why they played a special role in the history of the United States. This history isolates three key facts about firearms that inform the gun control debate.

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Improvement of an artificial test substrate technique for evaluation of em immunocytochemical labeling

Proceedings, annual meeting, Electron Microscopy Society of America ◽

10.1017/s0424820100128122 ◽

1987 ◽

Vol 45 ◽

pp. 762-763

Author(s):

G. D. Gagne ◽

M. F. Miller

Keyword(s):

Bovine Serum Albumin ◽

Serum Albumin ◽

Bovine Serum ◽

Artificial Substrate ◽

Chemical Fixation ◽

As If

We recently described an artificial substrate system which could be used to optimize labeling parameters in EM immunocytochemistry (ICC). The system utilizes blocks of glutaraldehyde polymerized bovine serum albumin (BSA) into which an antigen is incorporated by a soaking procedure. The resulting antigen impregnated blocks can then be fixed and embedded as if they are pieces of tissue and the effects of fixation, embedding and other parameters on the ability of incorporated antigen to be immunocyto-chemically labeled can then be assessed. In developing this system further, we discovered that the BSA substrate can also be dried and then sectioned for immunolabeling with or without prior chemical fixation and without exposing the antigen to embedding reagents. The effects of fixation and embedding protocols can thus be evaluated separately.

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