What is Culture? (Edward B. Tylor)

The word culture  has many different meanings.  For some it refers to an appreciation of good literature, music, art, and food.  For a biologist, it is likely to be a colony of bacteria or other microorganisms growing in a nutrient medium in a laboratory Petri dish.  However, for anthropologists and other behavioral scientists, culture is the full …

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THE SOCIAL ORGANISM AND THE COLLECTIVE MIND (Robert E. Park)

The problem of the social organism, inherited from Comte and Spencer, is the rock upon which the modern schools of sociology have split. Society is composed of parts that have the power of independent locomotion. The fundamental problem of sociology is how to conceive the relations between the parts in such a way as to …

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How Election Rules Affect Who Wins (Justin Grimmer and Eitan Hersh)

Contemporary election reforms that are purported to increase or decrease turnout tend to have negligible effects on election outcomes. We offer an analytical framework to explain why. Contrary to heated political rhetoric, election policies have small effects on outcomes because they tend to target small shares of the electorate, have a small effect on turnout, …

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Judge blocks new Florida election law, signed by DeSantis this spring, calling it the ‘latest assault on the right to vote'(Charles R. Davis)

Calling it Florida’s “latest assault on the right to vote,” a federal judge on Monday put a temporary hold on a new election law that would have imposed more limits on voter registration efforts. In May, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed SB 7050, a package of Republican-sponsored reforms to Florida’s election system, including a ban on …

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What is Wrong With Inequality? (Amartya Sen)

Dr Sen discusses the value of inequality-aversion judged as a basic human concern and to what extent it might conflict with other human values, such as economic efficiency and freedom. He received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998, and in 2012 he became the first non-American in history to be awarded the National Humanities …

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