Jerome Powell's future as US Fed Chair is under review

Significance The White House is considering whether to give Powell, a Trump appointee, a second four-year term. Replacing him would provide an opportunity to refresh Fed policy but recent reports suggest that Powell has the significant support of Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. Impacts Markets will react negatively if Powell is replaced by someone regarded as too pliant to the White House. Biden knows that progressive Democrats want the Fed to put greater emphasis on distributional inequality and racial wealth gaps. The Fed will continue to face the challenge of negotiating between higher inflation and interest rate rises to ensure stability. Economic indicators are proving difficult to read in the post-pandemic environment, challenging the efficacy of monetary policy.

Harnessing the Fifth Element of Distributional Statistics for Psychological Science: A Practical Primer and Shiny App for Measures of Statistical Inequality and Concentration

Although distributional inequality and concentration are important statistical concepts in many research fields (including economics, political and social science, information theory, and biology and ecology), they rarely are considered in psychological science. This practical primer familiarizes with the concepts of statistical inequality and concentration and presents an overview of more than a dozen useful, popular measures of inequality (including the Gini, Hoover, Rosenbluth, Herfindahl-Hirschman, Simpson, Shannon, generalized entropy, and Atkinson indices, and tail ratios). Additionally, an interactive web application (R Shiny) for calculating and visualizing these measures, with downloadable output, is described. This companion Shiny app provides brief introductory vignettes to this suite of measures, along with easy-to-understand user guidance. The Shiny app can readily be used as an intuitively accessible, interactive learning and demonstration environment for teaching and exploring these methods. We provide various examples for the application of measures of inequality and concentration in psychological science and discuss venues for further development.

Justice in Intellectual Property

Intellectual property (IP) rights represent an anomaly within a free market economic system. IP rights, that is, necessarily constrain the actions of individuals within the market. In response to this anomaly, IP scholars have offered various justifications for the application of such supposed constraints within a free market economy. Chief among these justifications is the widespread appeal to utilitarianism via incentivization. Yet, it is not exactly clear that this incentivization is actually producing the benefits required for the utilitarian justification. Rather than abandoning the IP system, however, some have simply suggested an alternative justification. These scholars argue that IP rights are actual, moral rights that deserve protection as moral rights. Further, scholars argue that any distributional inequality generated by the IP system are nonetheless justified under Rawls’s theory of justice. I argue, however, that Rawls’s theory of justice does cannot “justify” a selective, IP regime.

Second-Order Differential Operators on Arbitrary Open Sets

In this chapter, three different methods are described for obtaining nice operators generated in some L2 space by second-order differential expressions and either Dirichlet or Neumann boundary conditions. The first is based on sesquilinear forms and the determination of m-sectorial operators by Kato’s First Representation Theorem; the second produces an m-accretive realization by a technique due to Kato using his distributional inequality; the third has its roots in the work of Levinson and Titchmarsh and gives operators T that are such that iT is m-accretive. The class of such operators includes the self-adjoint operators, even ones that are not bounded below. The essential self-adjointness of Schrödinger operators whose potentials have strong local singularities are considered, and the quantum-mechanical interpretation of essential self-adjointness is discussed.

The social structure of european inequality: a multidimensional perspective

<span>The aim of this article is to present some contributions to the understanding of social inequality in Europe today. We analyse the distributional inequalities of economic and educational resources as well as the categorical inequalities between nation states and between social classes. The source of the empirical data was the European Social Survey 2012. We were able to calculate European income deciles, build a matrix of class-country segments, and analyse the intersections of this structural matrix with the distributions of income and schooling. The results reveal high degrees of distributional inequality in Europe. They also show the structural configurations assumed in Europe by the intersection of distributive and categorical inequalities.</span>