What Confers Political Legitimacy in a Modern Society?

In this essay Wight considered several sources of legitimacy for a modern Western society. A well-functioning state bureaucracy is a necessity. Popular consultation involving the consent of the governed is also essential. In Britain elective parliamentary democracy meets this need. Citizens must agree on the principle of respecting current laws pending their revision through legal channels. A new authoritative source of legitimacy may replace an old one if citizens transfer their loyalty to it. Time may either heal the injured and legitimate the results of social conflicts or exacerbate antagonisms. Communist regimes and right-wing autocrats such as General Franco in Spain and the Shah of Iran appealed to a principle of ‘legitimation by success’. Other legitimation myths have included ‘childhood ideas of Robin Hood’, ‘the siege’, and ‘the pilgrimage’, but the most fundamental source of legitimacy resides in the blood shed for a society’s independence and the rebirth of its great founding principles. This bloodshed justifies the society’s rededication to pursuing its unfinished work. An opposing question concerns the individual dissenter’s political legitimacy, which must hinge on certain criteria (such as rationality and conscientiousness) to win moral respect. The ‘rationalist illusion’ supposes that citizens can be critical spectators in the proceedings of their own society and its politics. Such detachment is not attainable, and derives from the fallacy that political life can be reduced to the conscious and purposeful management of material needs.

Programa ICMS Patrimônio Cultural

O presente artigo aborda de forma sistemática e histórica a criação e consolidação da Lei Robin Hood em Minas Gerais e do Programa ICMS Patrimônio Cultural, instrumento de normatização para implementação do critério patrimônio cultural da referida Lei pelas municipalidades. Apresenta e explicita as diretrizes e normativas elaboradas pelo IEPHA/MG, responsável pela coordenação do Programa, voltadas para a gestão, proteção, salvaguarda e promoção do patrimônio cultural local, inclusive as alternativas buscadas para o período da pandemia. Além disso, apresenta alguns indicadores nestes 25 anos de existência do Programa, avaliando os ganhos obtidos, pari passu aos desafios enfrentados.

The Robin Hood Index Adjusted for Negatives and Equivalised Incomes

Indisputable figures on income and wealth inequality are indispensable for politics, society and science. Although the Gini coefficient is the most common measure of inequality, the straightforward concept of the Robin Hood index (namely, the income share that has to be transferred from the rich to the poor to make everyone equally well off) makes it a more attractive measure for the general public. In a distribution with many negative values – particularly wealth distributions – the Robin Hood index can take on values larger than 1, indicating an intuitively impossible income transfer of more than 100%. This article proposes a method to normalise the Robin Hood index. In contrast to the original index, the normalised Robin Hood index always takes on values between 0 and 1 and ends up as the original index in a distribution without negatives. As inequality measures are commonly applied to equivalised income, we also introduce a method for adequately transferring equivalised incomes from the rich to the poor within the framework of the (normalised) Robin Hood index. An empirical application shows the effect of normalisation for the Robin Hood index, and compares it to the normalisation of the Gini coefficient from previous research.

Ethical and legal responsibility for Artificial Intelligence

Abstract“In civilized life, law floats in a sea of ethics”, a quote by the former Chief Justice of the United States, Earl Warren. In a democratic society, the constitution defines the country’s values, and the laws define the preferred or at least still tolerated behavior, making deviations sanctionable. As the society is in a continuous flow, also based on scientific and technical developments, law always lags behind. Until regulations can catch up, ethics has to lead society. In less democratic societies, the water gets polluted up to poisoned, ethical behavior may be against ruling law. As for the latter, Robin Hood was a thief, but for most parts of the population, a hero. The less transparent the water, the more difficult to adapt law to new developments. This includes direct corruption, but also unfaithful lobbying. This article discusses the “nature” of Artificial Intelligence, including the risks its posing, and who is responsible for systematic errors, from a moral, but also legal point.

NOT YOUR ROBIN HOOD: GAMESTOP AND PLATFORM ECONOMICS AT PLAY

In January 2021, GameStop and AMC, stocks with no discernable reason for an increase in value, rose abruptly in price. This was soon understood as the result of manipulation by members of the r/WallStreetBets subreddit. While individualized stock trading is often framed as equalizing the playing field, everyday people remain second-class participants in the stock market, which quickly became clear as trading was suspended on stocks the Redditors targeted. Backlash against this decision played out across platforms. We argue that this incident is the inevitable result of treating platforms (and economics) through the lens of gaming and trolling. The first key issue in the r/WallStreetBets incident was content moderation, as the Robinhood trading app stopped the trading, the subreddit the traders used to organize went private, and the corresponding Discord server was banned. The second important factor in this incident was coordinated inauthentic action, as thwarted traders immediately turned to the app store and targeted Robinhood with a review bombing campaign. Third, while the popular response to the r/WallStreetBets saga was frequently celebratory, seeing their actions as a challenge to capitalism and evidence of progressive politics, longstanding tropes associating Jewish people with capital, meant that Redditors’ anti-capitalism slid easily into anti-Semitism. Ultimately, many of the patterns of the Reddit stock incident locate it in a long history of coordinated internet action steeped in toxic technocultures. However, the expansion of these practices into taking direct action on economic systems worth billions of dollars is new and calls for rigorous attention