Group Membership or Identity?

As part of an article symposium on Partha Dasgupta and Sanjeev Goyal’s “Narrow Identities” (2019, Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics), Miriam Teschl reflects on the distinctive concept of identity liberal cosmopolitans have and how it may or may not be captured in economic models of identity choice.

Choosing Ethnicity: The Interplay Between Individual and Social Motives

This paper studies how material incentives and social norms shape ethnic identity choices in China. Provincial policies give material benefits to minorities, which consequently affect the ethnicity choices for children in ethnically mixed marriages. We formalize the ethnic identity choice in a simple framework, which highlights the interaction of (i) material benefits stemming from ethnic policies, (ii) identity costs associated with breaking the norm of following the father’s ethnicity, and (iii) social reputations altering the importance of identity costs. Consistent with the model, we find that ethnic policies increase the propensity to break the prevailing norm for mixed families with minority mothers. Moreover, the impact of ethnic policies is larger in localities where more such families follow the norm. More broadly, our study shows (1) how government policies can shape identity choices and (2) how one can allow for both complementarity and substitutability between individual and social motives in empirical analyses.

Growing up in Japan

This chapter studies immigrant children's diverse strategies to make sense of their subjectivities and establish their relationships with Japanese society. In particular, it examines how changing environments, especially the different institutional contexts they go through in the course of their growing up, contribute to the shaping of their identities. Born to foreign parents, immigrant children in Japan are surrounded by a complex cultural and social environment and have to continually adjust their relationships to such contexts and modify their subjectivities in the course of doing so. Because nationality is a powerful identification, they also have to negotiate their own identity between Japan—the place where they live and are acculturated to but at times rejected by—and the country or countries where their parents are from and where their passports say they are from. This process of encounters and negotiations enhances their awareness of the limits and freedom of being immigrants in Japan. In the end, among a group of them, a cosmopolitan self emerges as a response to the limited repertoire of identity choice. In other words, many immigrant children, unwilling to resign to either nationality, choose to become citizens of the world.

The fourth age, frailty and transitions

One of the implications of an ageing population is the growing number of people aged 85 years and over. This cohort is increasingly described as belonging to the fourth age: a life stage that ‘demarcates experiences that occur at the intersection of advanced age and impairment’. The fourth age intersects with frailty: a biomedical status characterised by multiple impairment, decline and dependency.26 per cent of those aged 85 years and over are considered to be frail. The losses and challenges that accompany the fourth age, including becoming frail, can be conceptualised as transitions. Physical, psychological and experiential transitions tend to multiply in the fourth age and to co-occur. The fourth age, frailty and transitions intersect in a complex and mutually reinforcing way posing a profound challenge to mental health and psychological wellbeing. Autonomy, agency, dignity, independence, identity, choice and control are all threatened. Older people’s accounts draw attention to a need to accommodate both change and continuity and to preserving selfhood. A discourse dominated by a focus on ill health and frailty tends to obscure the influence of the lifecourse, including inequalities, on health outcomes. A policy and practice focus on ‘managing frailty’ is a key example.