Incel Activity on Social Media Linked to Local Mating Ecology

Young men with few prospects of attracting a mate have historically threatened the internal peace and stability of societies. In some contemporary societies, such involuntary celibate—or incel—men promote much online misogyny and perpetrate real-world violence. We tested the prediction that online incel activity arises via local real-world mating-market forces that affect relationship formation. From a database of 4 billion Twitter posts (2012–2018), we geolocated 321 million tweets to 582 commuting zones in the continental United States, of which 3,649 tweets used words peculiar to incels and 3,745 were about incels. We show that such tweets arise disproportionately within places where mating competition among men is likely to be high because of male-biased sex ratios, few single women, high income inequality, and small gender gaps in income. Our results suggest a role for social media in monitoring and mitigating factors that lead young men toward antisocial behavior in real-world societies.

A Network of Iconography

This article demonstrates how an expanding population of artists in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic was connected artistically, and how such connections were translated into artistic innovations that fuelled the rapid flourishing of Dutch arts and the art market. It does so by conceptualising and visualising an art-historical network of iconography that, for the first time, connects artists not through social relations but through shared subject matters. Using network analysis, this study revisits the definition of product innovations used by the socio-economic art historian John Michael Montias. It further demonstrates that painters’ choices of subject matter, styles, and qualities were often unrelated while artists’ thematic connections had little to do with their social relations and the location of their residence. Rather, the choices of subject matter were subject to market forces and rooted deeply in an artist’s ability, ambition, and marketing strategy. Lastly, this article visualises the artistic network implied in Rembrandt’s rivals by Eric Jan Sluijter, which helps explain the breakaway success of the Dismissal of Hagar paintings.

Global control of COVID-19: good vaccines may not suffice

The COVID-19 pandemic has unveiled health and socioeconomic inequities around the globe. Effective epidemic control requires the achievement of herd immunity, where susceptible individuals are conferred indirect protection by being surrounded by immunized individuals. The proportion of people that need to be vaccinated to obtain herd immunity is determined through the herd immunity threshold. However, the number of susceptible individuals and the opportunities for contact between infectious and susceptible individuals influence the progress of an epidemic. Thus, in addition to vaccination, control of a pandemic may be difficult or impossible to achieve without other public health measures, including wearing face masks and social distancing. This article discusses the factors that may contribute to herd immunity and control of COVID-19 through the availability of effective vaccines and describes how vaccine effectiveness in the community may be lower than that expected. It also discusses how pandemic control in some countries and populations may face vaccine accessibility barriers if market forces strongly regulate the new technologies available, according to the inverse care law.

Outsourcing the enforcement of modern slavery: Overcoming the limitations of a market-based disclosure model

Recent legislative efforts to address modern slavery emphasise corporate disclosure as the primary regulatory tool. New modern slavery disclosure laws harden the expectation that business will conduct itself responsibly; however, they are founded on a soft approach to enforcement which is essentially outsourced to the market. This paper questions the effectiveness of this disclosure-based enforcement mechanism, which primarily relies on a narrowly defined concept of ‘the market’ as the basis for its regulatory strategy. Drawing on comparisons with alternative legislative enforcement frameworks to counter foreign bribery and illegal logging, this paper highlights the opportunities and limitations of reliance on market forces for regulation and suggests a path forward for enhancing the modern slavery enforcement approach.

State, Market, and Media in Indian Cricket

Avipsu Halder’s essay distils a watershed moment when big private broadcasters muscled out state media, and sports became vulnerable to global market forces. Using a political economy perspective the author points out that the socioeconomic groups that dominate the state and its agencies are also at the helm in sports, especially cricket and its governance. Further the differences among these forces over India’s globalisation played itself out in the disputes over broadcast rights and regulations in the early years. The author examines two moments, one, the Hero Cup and how the Doordarshan lost its rights to broadcast. and the allocation of television rights for Indian Premier League matches in and after 2004. In both cases the roles played by the state, its media arm, a private players and the cricketing bodies.

China’s Innovation Machine

This chapter sets the context of China’s innovation machine. It introduces its characteristics, including massive numbers of innovators embedded in China’s manufacturing and supply chains that offer efficiency, flexibility, and resilience; the emergence of the digital economy; and pragmatic government policies that have seen the nation progress from a period of catch-up with world leaders to a position of leadership in some fields. It explains the importance of Chinese culture for innovation and the ability of the nation to operate with ‘multiple institutional logics’ of state control and market forces. Challenges confronting China’s innovation machine are outlined, including in some areas of advanced technology and basic research, the fracturing of globalization, and the reascendancy of central planning.

Decentralized finance and SME in Latin America

Latin America is undergoing a profound reorganization. Though the worst years of the recession seem tobe behind us, the future remains fraught with uncertainty. Latin American nations will need to adapt tooperating in an increasingly deregulated and open economy governed by market sovereignty in thecoming years. Commitment to market forces, on the other hand, should not entail the State ceasing tointervene in the economy, but rather redefining the scope and intensity of its engagement. Futurepublic policies should shift away from managing a basic reality defined by governmental laws andcontrols and toward managing a more complex environment defined by numerous actors, private andpublic, operating under competitive norms and interacting with one another. Within this broadercontext, decentralization processes emerge as a primary forum for state transformation. This articlediscusses the primary qualities that must be retained by an economic adjustment plan aimed atachieving compatible fundamental macroeconomic balances and ensuring democracy's survival. Second,the study argues for seeing the present trend toward decentralization not only as a political byproductof democratic consolidation, but as a crucial component of a broader strategy of positive adjustment.

COVID-19: How community businesses in England struggled to respond to their communities’ needs

Economic policies tend to downplay social and community considerations in favour of market-led and business-focussed support. The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the need for greater and deeper social cohesion and local social support networks while highlighting that an overreliance on market forces can create social problems at times of need. Community businesses (CBs) are not for profit organisations that provide services and produce goods where the profit (or surplus) is reinvested back into that community. This article explores why CBs in England responded in a variety of ways to the COVID-19 pandemic, assesses what government policy did to help and hinder their place-based operations, and explores the observed socioeconomics of their age-related volunteer staff churn. Some CBs were ravaged by the consequences of the pandemic and associated government policies with many becoming unsustainable, while others evolved and augmented their support for and services to their communities, thereby enhancing their community’s resilience. We highlight how adjustments to government policies could enhance the sustainability of CBs, making them and the communities they serve more resilient.

More of the Same? Comparing the Personalities of Ex-Spouse and New Partner after Divorce

The similarity of the Big Five personality traits of ex-spouses and new partners was examined post-divorce. The notion that divorcees replicate their partner choice (fixed-type hypothesis) was tested against the hypotheses that they learn to select a new partner with more marriage-stabilizing personality traits than their former spouse (learning hypothesis), or are constrained by marriage market forces to repartner with someone who has less stabilizing personality traits (marriage market hypothesis). Data was derived from a Flemish study that sampled divorcees from the national register. The sample consisted of 700 triads of divorcees, their ex-spouses, and their new partners. The analysis results rejected the fixed-type hypothesis and instead supported both the learning hypothesis and the marriage market hypothesis, with higher order repartnering supporting the latter. Women also seemed to validate both hypotheses, as their partner comparison showed decreases in both stabilizing traits (conscientiousness and agreeableness) and destabilizing traits (neuroticism and extraversion). Overall, the results seem to suggest that divorcees do not repartner with someone of the same personality as their ex-spouse, and they are in some cases constrained by marriage market forces to repartner with less stabilizing personalities, while in other cases they are able to improve their partner selection.