Various kinds of consumer-driven reforms have been attempted over the last 20 years in an effort to rein in soaring costs of health care in the United States. Most are based on a theory of moral hazard, which holds that patients will over-utilize health care services unless they pay enough for them. Although this theory is a basic premise of conventional health insurance, it has been discredited by actual experience over the years. While ineffective in containing costs, increased (...) class='Hi'>cost-sharing as a key element of consumer-driven health care leads to restricted access to care, underuse of necessary care, lower quality and worse outcomes of care. This paper summarizes the three major problems of U.S. health care urgently requiring reform and shows how cost-sharing fails to meet that goal. (shrink)

Online music sharing, deemed illegal for invading intellectual property rights under current laws, has become a crucial issue for the music industry in the modern digital age, but few have investigated the potential costs and utilities for individuals involved in such online misbehavior. This study aimed to fill in this gap to predict consumers' intentions to engage in online music sharing and further consider consumers' online music sharing knowledge as a moderator in the research model. The results (...) of repeated measures analysis of variance of costs and utilities of online music sharing not only give more detailed information to grasp empirical implications but also provide some suggestions to the music industry in Taiwan. (shrink)

Changes in healthcare financing increasingly rely upon patient cost-sharing to control escalating healthcare expenditures. These changes raise new challenges for physicians that are different from those that arose either under managed care or traditional indemnity insurance. Historically, there have been two distinct bases for arguing that physicians should not consider costs in their clinical decisions—an “aspirational ethic” that exhorts physicians to treat all patients the same regardless of their ability to pay, and an “agency ethic” that calls on (...) physicians to be trustworthy advisors to their patients. In the setting of greater patient cost-sharing, physicians' aspiration and agency roles increasingly conflict. Satisfactorily navigating the new terrain of consumer-driven healthcare requires physicians to consider these two roles and how they can best be reconciled so as to maximize quality of care while respecting the heterogeneity of patients' financial resources and willingness to pay. (shrink)

Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBM) induce drug manufacturers to offer rebates to insurers and employers by denying coverage through formulary exclusions, impeding physician prescription through prior authorization, and reducing patient drug use through cost sharing. As they tighten these access obstacles, PBMs reduce the net prices received by the manufacturers.

Robust technology infrastructure is needed to enable learning health care systems to improve quality, access, and cost. Such infrastructure relies on the trust and confidence of individuals to share their health data for healthcare and research. Few studies have addressed consumers’ views on electronic data sharing and fewer still have explored the dual purposes of healthcare and research together. The objective of the study is to explore factors that affect consumers’ willingness to share electronic health information for healthcare (...) and research. This study involved a random-digit dial telephone survey of 800 adult Californians conducted in English and Spanish. Logistic regression was performed using backward selection to test for significant associations of each explanatory variable with the outcome variable. The odds of consent for electronic data sharing for healthcare decreased as Likert scale ratings for EHR impact on privacy worsened, odds ratio = 0.74, 95% CI [0.60, 0.90]; security, OR = 0.80, 95% CI [0.66, 0.98]; and quality, OR = 0.59, 95% CI [0.46–0.75]. The odds of consent for sharing for research was greater for those who think EHR will improve research quality, OR = 11.26, 95% CI [4.13, 30.73]; those who value research benefit over privacy OR = 2.72, 95% CI [1.55, 4.78]; and those who value control over research benefit OR = 0.49, 95% CI [0.26, 0.94]. Consumers’ choices about electronically sharing health information are affected by their attitudes toward EHRs as well as beliefs about research benefit and individual control. Design of person-centered interventions utilizing electronically collected health information, and policies regarding data sharing should address these values of importance to people. Understanding of these perspectives is critical for leveraging health data to support learning health care systems. (shrink)

Community shared agriculture is a concept that brings food producers and consumers together in a relationship that supports values associated with sustainable agriculture, community development, and food security. At the heart of the concept is the notion of sharing. Participants share the real costs of food production through fair prices for the farmer and by assuming part of the risk of poor harvests. They also share the rewards that come through a seasons supply of fresh produce, the development of (...) fellowship, and the knowledge that they are part of an effort to “think globally, act locally.”. (shrink)

Out-of-court proceedings or alternative dispute resolution (ADR) is a peaceful, voluntary alternative method for settling disputes without litigation in the court. ADR institutions usually use a third party to help the consumer and the trader to reach a solution. The main purpose of this article is to share the main insights and experience about the out-of-court proceedings in various countries and European Union Member States, to discuss the most important problems concerning ADR and propose possible solutions of these problems. (...) First of all, in this article, ADR is presented and its main advantages are outlined. For example, ADR institutions are indeed a low-cost and quick alternative for consumers for settling disputes with businesses. ADR mechanisms are highly diverse. There are public and private institutions as well as institutions established on the basis of cooperation between the public sector and the industry or consumer organizations and the industry. Although there is a high correlation between the nature of the institution and the funding, i.e. private institutions are usually financed by the industry and public institutions by public funds, ADR bodies established by public law can also be financed by the industry (especially in highly regulated markets). In the majority of the institutions, the participation of the industry in the ADR procedure is voluntary. (shrink)

Out-of-court proceedings or alternative dispute resolution (ADR) is a peaceful, voluntary alternative method for settling disputes without litigation in the court. ADR institutions usually use a third party to help the consumer and the trader reach a solution. The main purpose of this article is to share the main insights and experience about the out-of-court proceedings in various countries and present main trends of ADR development. First of all, in this article, ADR is presented and its main advantages or (...) disadvantages, main reasons of its origin are outlined. For example, ADR institutions are indeed a low-cost and quick alternative for consumers to settle disputes with businesses. These are the main reasons why ADR originated and developed so fast in the United States of America. Secondly, it is important to analyse various definitions used to describe ADR and its characteristics, because it is a very complicated and complex phenomenon. ADR and the principle of legal accessibility are also very closely related issues which are deeply analysed in this article. (shrink)

This paper presents a critical evaluation of Mark Sagoff's critique of economistic approaches to environmental decision-making in The Economy of the Earth. Whilst endorsing many of Sagoff's specific arguments against the use of extended versions of cost-benefit analysis in making such decisions, it criticises the conceptual framework within which these arguments are developed. In particular, it suggests that what Sagoff represents as a tension between consumers and their public roles as citizens is better understood as one between culturally shared (...) values concerning both the protection of nature and the pursuit of consumption; and that this conflict has itself to be resolved by them as citizens. (shrink)

With increasing market competition and rapid development of service economy, more and more enterprises are shifting from providing products or services to providing product-service systems that integrate products and services, in order to improve competitiveness and profitability. Meanwhile, consumers have strategic delayed purchasing behavior when purchasing the PSS and high requirements for service quality. This paper investigates the two-period pricing and service quality decisions of product-service supply chain considering consumers’ strategic behavior under decentralized and centralized scenarios. The equilibrium results are (...) compared in two scenarios. In order to eliminate performance loss under the decentralized scenario, we design two-period dynamic contracts to coordinate the PSSC. Furthermore, numerical simulation is provided to verify the feasibility of the contracts. The following conclusions can be drawn: the higher the service input-efficiency, the more beneficial for alleviating consumers’ strategic purchase behavior under two scenarios, but this mitigation effect is more obvious under the centralized scenario. Compared with the centralized scenario, the service quality is lower, the two-period PSS sales prices are higher, and the two-period profit is lower under the decentralized scenario. The proportion of service valuation will promote the widening of the service quality gap under two scenarios, but in some cases, the service input-efficiency will weaken the promotion effect of the proportion of service valuation. The design of the two-period combined contracts depends on the proportion of service valuation. When the proportion of service valuation is high, the “two-period revenue sharing + service-cost sharing” combined dynamic contract can achieve PSSC perfect coordination. However, when the proportion of service valuation is low, it is necessary to design complexity combined dynamic contract which can achieve PSSC perfect coordination. (shrink)

The presence of a kinship link between nuclear families is the strongest predictor of interhousehold sharing in an indigenous, predominantly Dolgan food-sharing network in northern Russia. Attributes such as the summed number of hunters in paired households also account for much of the variation in sharing between nuclear families. Differences in the number of hunters in partner households, as well as proximity and producer/consumer ratios of households, were investigated with regard to cost-benefit models. The subset (...) of households involved in reciprocal meal sharing is 26 of 84 household host-guest pairs. The frequency of reciprocal meal sharing between families in this subset is positively correlated with average household relatedness. The evolution of cooperation through clustering may illuminate the relationship between kinship and reciprocity at this most intimate level of food sharing. (shrink)

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to review current practice in sharing and mining medical data revealing benefits, costs and ethical issues. Based on stakeholder perspectives and values, the authors create an ethical code to regulate the sharing and mining of medical information. Design/methodology/approach The framework is based on a review of academic, practitioner and legal research. Findings Owing to the inability of current safeguards to protect consumers from risks related to the disclosure of medical information, the (...) authors develop a framework for ethical sharing and mining of medical data, security, transparency, respect, accountability, community and quality, which espouses security, transparency, respect, accountability, community and quality as the basic tenets of ethical data sharing and mining practice. Research limitations/implications The STRACQ framework is an original, previously unpublished contribution that will require modification over time based on discussion and debate within and among the academy, medical community and public policymakers. Social implications The framework for sharing borrows from the Fair Credit Reporting Act, allowing the collection and dissemination of identified medical data but placing strict limitations on use. Following this framework, benefits of shared and mined medical data are freely available with appropriate safeguards for consumer privacy. Originality/value Mandates for adoption of electronic health-care records require an understanding of medical data mining. This paper presents a review of data mining techniques and reasons for engaging in the practice of identifying benefits, costs and ethical issues. The authors create an original framework, STRACQ, for ethical sharing and mining of medical information, allowing knowledge exploration while protecting consumer privacy. (shrink)

Sustainable products are engineered to reduce environmental, ecological, and human costs of consumption. Not all consumers value sustainable products, however, and this poses negative societal implications. Using self-expansion theory as a guide, we explore how an individual’s general sense of belonging—or the perception that one is accepted and valued by others in the broader social world—alters their responses to sustainable products. Five experimental studies and a field study demonstrate that individuals lower in belonging respond less favorably to sustainable products in (...) terms of evaluations and willingness to pay than individuals higher in belonging. Process evidence shows that the extent to which individuals low in belonging perceive that collective, sustainable choices will impact them personally drives this result and that belonging does not impact responses to conventional (i.e., non-sustainable) products. However, perceiving a shared human experience—or that individuals share some important, basic similarities with all people—attenuates the negative effect of low belonging on responses to sustainable products for consumers both low and high in belonging. This research has significant implications for businesses and society given the growing sense of disconnect in modern society. (shrink)

Regulation is often applied to business behavior to ensure that the social costs of doing business are included in the cost and pricing structures of the firm. Because the consumer benefits from the transaction that generated the social costs, asking the consumer to bear the burden imposed by the transaction is fair. However, there may be a lack of Justice m the internal and external distribution of the social costs of doing business if consumers are the only (...) party bearing that burden, or if the costs are being shifted to employees or taxpayers when a closer stakeholder is also benefiting from the transaction – the stockowner. A social justice perspective requires that those benefiting from a transaction share in the burdens of it. We propose that a Tobin-like tax on stock transactions might be a just means of achieving greater justice in the distribution of the social cost burden. (shrink)

In vitro fertilization is now a well-established practice in the field of assisted reproduction. In 1995, over 41,000 IVF cycles were done in the United States, at a cost of more than $300 million. The overall success rate has risen to 22.8 deliveries per 100 egg-retrieval procedures. As the field has matured, the attention of policy-makers has shifted from questions about the ethical and legal status of human embryos to concerns about providing access and protecting consumers.Three such concerns have (...) emerged. One is the danger that IVF programs will disseminate misleading information about their success rates in order to attract patients. This problem, however, may be alleviated by the publication in late 1997 of the first of annual national and clinic specific reports, based on randomly audited data, by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Society of Reproductive Medicine, the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, and RESOLVE, pursuant to the federal 1992 Fertility Clinic Success Rate and Laboratory Certification Act. (shrink)

This paper incorporates fairness concerns and consumer reference price effects into a two-echelon building-material closed-loop supply chain consisting of a manufacturer and a retailer. By establishing four differential game models, we investigate the sustainable operations and cooperation of this supply chain. The four game models are a Nash noncooperative game, Stackelberg game with cost sharing, Stackelberg game with fairness concerns and cost sharing, and centralized decision model. By using dynamic models and optimal control theory, we (...) obtain the two members’ optimal equilibrium strategies in the supply chain. Analytical results show that the consumer reference price effect has a positive impact on the manufacturer’s effort level, retailer’s publicity level, and product brand goodwill, which can improve the supply chain performance. The retailer’s partial commitment to cost sharing can enhance the production enthusiasm of the manufacturer, improve the brand reputation of the product, and enhance the two members’ individual profitability. The distributional fairness concerns of the manufacturer not only prevent the manufacturer and retailer from achieving Pareto improvement but also lead to the decline of the manufacturer’s effort level and profitability. The research conclusions of this paper can provide some insights into the cooperation and sustainable development of the supply chain. (shrink)

For-profit managed care organizations face decisions about cost sharing that can involve a tradeoff between the interests of investors and the interests of patients. No successful business can ignore the interests of its investors, but moral philosophy points to ethical reasons for managed care organizations to make patients’ health, rather than investors’ profit, their primary goal. One reason is the ethical obligation of all businesses to avoid wrongful exploitation of vulnerable customers. An insurance company’s cost-sharing policy (...) can exploit customers either by collecting an unfairly large amount of money from them or by unfairly deterring them from making claims for resources they medically need. Another reason stems from the fact that managed care organizations’ profits derive in part from the existence of artificial barriers to access to medicine, notably including patents. Putting a fence around a water well in the desert is legitimate only if doing so facilitates a financial arrangement that maximizes people’s access to water they need. Likewise, patents and other artificial barriers to access to medically necessary drugs are legitimate only if they are used to help finance access to medical resources people need. For these reasons, managed care organizations should make cost-sharing decisions that maximize the sustainable availability of effective drugs to patients who need them. (shrink)

This paper considers a dual-channel supply chain with product customization. One manufacturer and one retailer are involved. The online direct sales channel sells standard and customized products, and the offline retail channel sells standard products. The prices and service levels of products sold via different channels are differentiated, and the customization level which influences the customization cost and choices of customers is decided by the manufacturer. Three game models are proposed: the manufacturer Stackelberg model, the retailer Stackelberg model, and (...) the Nash game model. The price and service decisions of the players are derived. Meanwhile, a service-cost-sharing contract is designed for the MS model. The impacts of price and service competition, service cost, and customers sensitivity to the customization level on the optimal decisions are investigated. Through the numerical analysis, we find that, among the three models, the manufacturer Stackelberg model is the most beneficial game structure for the overall supply chain but has the largest revenue gap between the two members. Second, under price competition and service competition, the manufacturer should differentiate the prices and services for direct sales standard products and customized products according to his market status. Third, the manufacturer should increase customization expenditures to construct his customization production line and provide more diversified products when consumers are more sensitive to product customization. (shrink)

Due to excessive greenhouse gas emissions, carbon emission-reducing measures are urgently needed. Important emission-reduction measures mainly include carbon trading and low-carbon cost subsidies. Comprehensive consideration of these two policies is a research hotspot in the field of low-carbon technology investment. Based on this background, this paper considers the impact of consumer low-carbon preferences on market demand and the impact of uncertainty in carbon emission-reduction behaviour. We construct a stochastic differential game model with upstream and downstream enterprises based on (...) cost-sharing coordination under a cost subsidy. From a dynamic perspective, this paper researches the optimal equilibrium strategy and evolution characteristics of the joint emission-reduction mechanism in a supply chain. This paper discusses the sensitivity of the parameters and uses numerical simulation to verify the impact of each parameter on the emission-reduction decision-making activities of stakeholders after introducing the cost subsidy. The results show that a cost subsidy policy can promote carbon emission-reduction investment and supply chain profit. Thus, it is important to strengthen technical cooperation and exchange among enterprises. (shrink)

In the Internet era, consumers prefer products with the attributes of social responsibility. Supply chain enterprises strengthen corporate social responsibility management for their own development. To improve CSR throughout the supply chain, it requires coordination and cooperation among the members of the supply chain. In this paper, we consider a three-tier supply chain system consisting of a supplier, a manufacturer, and a retailer and use stochastic differential game to study the CSR coordination of the supply chain. The following indicators are (...) investigated under four decision situations, such as the optimal level of CSR effort for the supply chain members, the optimal value of profit for the supply chain members and the supply chain system, and the expectation and variance of CSR goodwill. Some important results are obtained. Compared with decentralized decision-making, the optimal level of CSR effort increases for the supplier and the manufacturer under local alliance decision-making without cost sharing, whereas the optimal level of CSR effort remains unchanged for the retailer. Compared with local alliance decision-making without cost sharing, the optimal level of CSR effort remains unchanged for the supplier and the manufacturer under local alliance decision-making with cost sharing. When the sum of the marginal profit for the supplier and the manufacturer is greater than half of the marginal profit for the retailer, the optimal level of CSR effort increases for the retailer. Compared with local alliance decision-making with cost sharing, the optimal level of CSR effort increases for the supply chain members under overall alliance decision-making. From decentralized decision-making to local alliance decision-making without cost sharing, to local alliance decision-making with cost sharing, and then to overall alliance decision-making, the optimal value of profit increases for the supply chain members and the supply chain system. Also, the expectation and variance of CSR goodwill increase. (shrink)

In this study, we present a cost-sharing rule for cost-sharing problems. This rule prescribes the same allocations in a problem and in its dual one. Moreover, in some specific problems it gives the same allocations as the serial cost-sharing rule (Moulin and Shenker, Econometrica, 60, 1009–1037, 1992) does in a related problem. That is why we call it as the self-dual serial cost-sharing rule. We give two axiomatizations of this new rule and (...) another one for the serial cost-sharing rule. (shrink)

The Trump Administration has exposed both the durability and vulnerability of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act's insurance reforms. One of the Administration's first strikes at “Obamacare” was to discontinue federal government payment of cost-sharing reductions, which insurers pay to low-income enrollees on the exchanges to reduce their out-of-pocket share of medical spending. The states struck back with a clever solution that could hold insurers and enrollees harmless. This article examines this strategy and why, while impressive, it (...) reaffirms larger problems with the ACA's market-based approach to health reform and the need for new pathways forward. (shrink)

The use of autonomous weaponry in warfare has increased substantially over the last twenty years and shows no sign of slowing. Our chapter raises a novel objection to the implementation of autonomous weapons, namely, that they eliminate moral cost-sharing. To grasp the basics of our argument, consider the case of uninhabited aerial vehicles that act autonomously (i.e., LAWS). Imagine that a LAWS terminates a military target and that five civilians die as a side effect of the LAWS bombing. (...) Because LAWS lacks moral agency, and in particular the capacity for moral emotions, moral cost-sharing is limited to dead civilians and their loved ones. We argue that's unjust insofar as those responsible for unjust harm to others ought to share in those costs. Our worry expands to other strategic uses of AI, e.g., cyber warfare. This presents a dilemma: Either we design autonomous weaponry capable of moral emotions, or we limit the use of autonomous weaponry. The former undermines the risk-mitigation purpose of creating autonomous weaponry and expands the number of sentient individuals whose welfare is risked in war. The latter risks worsening combatant casualties and achieving strategic aims. (shrink)

This paper proposes an experimental test to evaluate the performance of the serial cost sharing rule, originally proposed by Shenker [Sigmetrics, 241–242 (1990)] and then analyzed by Moulin and Shenker [Econometrica 60, 1009–1037 (1992)]. We report measures of the performance and efficiency of the serial mechanism by comparing the choices and payoffs attained by the subjects to the expected equilibrium allocations. Experimental evidence shows that learning is needed for the subjects to converge to the equilibrium strategy. However, in (...) terms of efficiency, the serial mechanism leads to almost efficient allocations. (shrink)

It is an article of almost religious faith in the United Kingdom that the National Health Service is far superior to a competitive market in health care services. In this brief and informal paper I show that the opposite is true. In contrast to market provision, the existence of the National Health Service entails the following. First, consumer sovereignty is virtually destroyed, since what services the consumer receives and how much he pays (through taxation) are determined by the (...) government of the day in consultation with vested and ideological interests. Second, a person may be denied a life-saving service despite having contributed more than his fair share to National Health Service over the course of his working life. Third, people often spend less on health care than they would like to spend, because any additional contributions (via increased taxes) are not linked to any benefit specifically for the person who makes them. Fourth, provision of services free at the point of need which is not linked to what a person pays encourages a wasteful misuse of resources. Fifth, absence of competition between health care providers leads to high cost and poor quality of service and a tendency to produce a standardised service rather than a tailored one; and government attempts to address this problem usually make it worse. Sixth, people’s freedom to engage in particular activities or lifestyles is likely to be curtailed because the costs of those activities are artificially socialised. I also point out that issues of inequality or poverty are much better addressed by means other than a nationalised health service. (shrink)

As we know, the most interesting themes in modern Chinese societies are economic developments and environmental problems, both of them adhere closely. By the way, the main body of economic development is enterprise, the sustainable environments and economic developments are possible when enterprises make efforts to do their responsibilities for ‘green growth’. In shorts, enterprises are the most important agents for green growth. Like this, the roles of enterprises for green growth are very important for our future. Every economic activity (...) is made by enterprises, the government and the individuals. Also, all of them are interrelated with the sustainable environmental problems. Environmentally sustainable economic development is emerging as a new conceptual framework to address escalating environmental challenges created by increased pressure for economic growth and development. A sustainable future is one in which protection of the natural environments, economic prosperities and social justice are pursued simultaneously to ensure the good qualities of our life. It must be accomplished for our descendants, but it is not easy. And so, all of us have to do our best responsibilities. Business ethics is concerned about the members of corporations who make decisions and promote policies with moral value. After more than twenty years of development, business ethics in China demonstrate their own characteristics and development trends. In recent years, due to world economic circumstances, researches in Chinese business ethics concentrate on risks and security issues of enterprises, especially on cultural ethical risks. Under economical globalization, risks of transnational enterprise development include not only economic ones, but also political ones including unrest, potential for local war, and concerns about terrorism. In the long-terms, they also face cultural ethical risks. Generally speaking, through marketing research and self-growth, enterprises pay enough attention to trans-national and trans-regional economic or political risks, and exercise means of prevention. However, as for ethical risks, on the one hand, enterprises ignore their existence, or ignore their influence on enterprise’s security and sustainable development. On the other hand, during operations, firms lack prevention methods and avoidance strategies. This drives enterprises to consider ethical risks and corresponding ethical costs during transnational and trans-regional economic activities, so as to guarantee the real enterprise security in economic crises. In the mean time, social contribution of corporations is assumed to be one of their duties in modern societies. Especially, ethical management of corporations and their efforts for social contribution play a significant role in enhancing their corporate images and brand values, and help them greatly in getting consumers' reliability. Nowadays, Chinese enterprises also must be concerned about Creating Shared Value(CSV) in modern societies. Also, all moral considerations aside, we are left with the question concerning the possible positive contributions of unequal ranking and rewarding to social systems. The evidence regarding the mixed outcomes of social inequality strongly suggests the examination of alternatives. The evidence regarding the possibilities of social growth under conditions of more equal rewarding are such that the exploration of alternatives seems eminently worthwhile. In this paper, I have started from the development of business ethics and social enterprise in modern societies, and then elaborates the origin and characteristics of enterprise ethical risks, discusses the major types of ethical risks Chinese enterprises are facing, and on reducing risks and guarantee safety, provides some principals and paths which can be referred to. (shrink)

Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2009. 320pp. pbk. $19.95 ISBN-13: 978-0816666119. In Games of Empire , Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter expand an earlier study of “the video game industry as an aspect of an emerging postindustrial, post-Fordist capitalism” (xxix) to argue that videogames are “exemplary media of Empire” (xxix). Their notion of “Empire” is based on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire (2000), which (...) characterizes the contemporary world order as a decentralized system of global economic, political, and economic power that transcends national boundaries. In the view of the authors, Hardt and Negri’s account sets itself apart from other analyses of international politics by offering a “comprehensive account of conditions of work, forms of subjectivity, and types of struggle in contemporary capital” (xx). Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter thus divide Games of Empire into three sections to reflect each of these aspects of Empire ’s argument, seeing their work as the first account to explore “virtual games within a system of global ownership, privatized property, coercive class relations, military operations, and radical struggle” (xxix). Books in the University of Minnesota Press’s Electronic Mediations series “explore the humanistic and social implications” of new technologies that spark “significant changes in society and culture, politics and economics, thinking and being.” That’s an abstract goal, and one that Games of Empire surely meets. Yet at times it can be difficult to understand exactly which specific intervention this book seeks to make. It is unclear whether the authors of Games of Empire see their work as an indictment of game scholars’ lack of attention to political economy, or whether it’s a work of political theory hoping to show that other disciplines should be paying more attention to the production and play of videogames. Because Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter don’t directly criticize previous political critiques of gaming—such as Edward Castronova’s exploration of the “porous membrane” allowing two-way traffic between virtual economies and those of the real world, or Alexander Galloway’s unraveling of control protocols in algorithmic design, or Ian Bogost’s idea of political procedural rhetoric—they sometimes leave the reader wondering how to situate the book in the broader discourse on games and politics, either separately or together. Thus, Games of Empire might best be seen as an introduction to the writings of Hardt and Negri for game players and designers, rather than as a text for communicating the basic concepts of game studies and design. It is neither a truly new theory of games or digital media, nor is it a new theory of Empire—and that’s not a criticism. It is instead an introduction to Empire through popular culture, as Zizek does for Lacan in Looking Awry . If one were teaching an introductory course on contemporary political theory, this book would offer obvious inroads into Negri and Hardt’s thinking for a number of reasons. Despite its radical ideological bent, the book isn’t off-putting to readers who don’t necessarily share the authors’ politics. It synthesizes complex ideas from difficult thinkers like Marx, Foucault, and Guattari while integrating modifications and critiques of Empire theory itself. And although the book is dense, sometimes feeling longer than it actually is (just over 200 pages), Games of Empire maintains a breezy readability by tightly coupling core concepts of Empire theory to well-known games and widely-publicized conflicts within the videogame industry. The first section of the book focuses on immaterial labor, the accumulation of “cognitive capital,” and the global process of manufacturing videogame consoles. It is significant for the authors that videogames began as hacker experiments within research institutes of the military industrial complex, programmed on stolen time, before becoming a commodity (7). This is the first in a string of examples showing how creative dissidence and conflict fuel the continuing evolution of Empire’s control. Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter explain that the videogame industry now constitutes an international production apparatus dominating both creative work in developed nations and manual labor in developing ones. Because game industries in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan are predominately non-unionized, they serve as an exemplary system for analyzing how global capital exploits contemporary intellectual work—including an excellent analysis of the “EA Spouse” scandal of 2004. On the side of the consumer, the authors argue that rabid “console races” that drive the industry forward from a technological perspective serve to structure gamer identity and combat piracy; later in the book, these machines offer a window into the worlds of Congolese coltan mining and electronic waste (222-224). In the second section, Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter move on to deep case studies of individual games to show how the most popular game genres embed imperial assumptions about conflict, exchange, and urban life. First they argue that military training games such as Full Spectrum Warrior —co-developed by university researchers, industry developers, and military contractors—contribute to the “banalization” of war, a subjective state wherein perpetual preparedness for war is accepted as a part of everyday life (100). Chapter five covers Michel Foucalt’s notion of “biopower,” the extension of capital accumulation to life itself. The authors argue that virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft , which take market capitalism as a given and force players into essentialist roles and racial antagonisms, are organized to maximize control and profit (often on the backs of virtual currency “farmers” in China and southeast Asia). Finally, they criticize the naïve assumption that humor and cynicism in the popular sandbox game franchise Grand Theft Auto offer any remedy to its racialized, violent content. Instead, such games indulge and normalize the fantasy of getting rich at any cost by keeping the realities of contemporary urban life and corporate greed at a safe distance (181). Part three of Games of Empire focuses on “games of multitude,” a preliminary attempt to escape from Empire’s order through alternate modes of videogame development and play. Multitude is defined dialectically, as “the engine and the enemy” of Empire (187). This is the most important, yet also most contradictory section of the text. It lays bare the process by which Empire and its media feed our creative and intellectual development to overabundance. At a certain point, the force of the multitude reaches such a level that it threatens the stability of Empire; however, instead of following Hardt and Negri’s utopian assumptions about the radical potential of the multitude, the authors here follow Paolo Virno’s warning that Empire is “very good at adopting apparently iconoclastic practices and utopian ideas as management techniques and revenue sources” (188). At every turn, advances in player configurative power provide new sources of revenue and advertising angles for the game industry. A disappointing shortcoming of these latter pages is the lack of truly new examples for radical resistance within game development. Instead, it turns out that the radical left seems satisfied with the same mild successes that the left-of-center also has celebrated: artist’s mods, virtual world activism, and critical counterplay within strategy- and wargames. Having been frequently cited by many authors before Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, this idea of subversion or resistance through play feels tired and unpersuasive. It is unclear if the authors believe it is possible to embrace game design itself as a way of pursuing what they call “exodus” from Empire, or if an all-too-fashionable subversion is the only workable strategy. While the book does explore how the earliest independent game studios were eventually subverted and incorporated into the game industry proper, it doesn’t affirm or critique more recent non-commercial, DIY game development projects such as Klik-of-the-Month Club and Ludum Dare. Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter’s analysis of so-called “tactical games,” including the editorial works of La Molleindustria, leads to an even more ambivalent take on the contemporary design ecology. At the conclusion of his essay on “Countergaming,” Galloway asserts that avant-garde videogame artists “should create new grammars of action […] should create alternative algorithms” (Galloway 125). Yet Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter characterize works such as McDonald’s Video Game and Oiligarchy as didactic, suggesting that the role of radical political games might be “limited to that of agitprop” (199). They are concerned that games like those of Molleindustria rigidly structure the activities of their players in order to prove a point. Yet, despite their repeated assertion that the equation of greater interactivity with democratic digital liberation is flawed, the authors see potential in policy simulators that “allow players to edit or tweak” (202) their parameters in response to what Bogost has called simulation fever , the simultaneous drive toward and fear of simulation (Bogost 108). The possibility of practicing radical design is bucked, and early attempts at critical game development like those of Molleindustria’s seem to be relegated to the status of exceptions that prove the rule for player-centered exodus. Overall, there is one glaring question Games of Empire leaves unanswered: how exactly are videogames the “exemplary media” of Empire, and what are the implications of videogames being exemplary in this way? Presumably Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter want to avoid essentialist claims, so they’re not keen on following Wark’s desire to mark “the game’s difference from [legacy media] as something that speaks to changes in the overall structure of social and technical relations” (Wark 225). It is also unclear how the production apparatuses, labor standards, and subjectivizing processes involved in the creation and use of other any other kind of digital media would fail to justify their equally exemplary status. Even the book’s concluding paragraph holds that virtual games “are one molecular component of this undecidable collective mutation” (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 229) of intellect, labor, and daily life. In the end, the authors seem to back away from their focus on games as exemplary to bring their work in line with broader theories of the gradual digitization of the everyday, in line with Galloway and Manovich. Despite these flaws, there is an undeniable elegance to Games of Empire ’s contrasting of gaming’s overwhelmingly imperial content with its multitudinous form . And its ambivalence about the potential of independent or political game development might be seen by scholars of Empire as a strength rather than a weakness, an acceptance that every new expression of multitude offers another opportunity for the expansion of Empire. The book also functions as a strong, all-encompassing call to greater responsibility on the part of mainstream game developers to be more conscious of the ideologies they embed in their work, of the way their intellectual property is used and manipulated by those who employ them, and of the material impact their industry has on the world at large. For players it offers a toolbox of concepts for radical examinations of their own play activities, asking them to be more cognizant of the consequences of their consumption of digital media and the ways in which their virtual lives interface with the real. REFERENCES Bogost, Ian. Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism . Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006. Castranova, Edward. Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games . Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Dyer-Witheford, Nick and de Peuter, Greig. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games . Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Galloway, Alexander. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture . Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). Wark, McKenzie. Gamer Theory . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Managed Health Care: New Ethical Issues for All*Martina Darragh (bio) and Pat Milmoe McCarrick (bio)Changes in the way that health care is perceived, delivered, and financed have occurred rapidly in a relatively short time span. The 50-year period since World War II encompasses enormous growth in medical technology, soaring health care costs, and significant fragmentation of the two-party patient- physician relationship. This relationship first grew to include the third-party (...) payer, the health insurance industry, and now “with great speed and relatively little public awareness, a significant change has occurred in the way some decisions are made about a patient’s medical care” (III, Institute of Medicine 1989).The new means of providing health care bring an increasing number of parties into clinical decision-making processes. With this change, ethical issues that once concerned only health care professionals, the physician or the nurse, have expanded to include the patient and the groups who “manage” care—e.g., health maintenance organizations (HMOs), preferred provider organizations (PPOs), point of service groups (POSs), independent practice associations (IPAs), insurance reviewers, hospital administrators, institutional managers, and, the most recent players, purchasers of group health care who base their decisions on competitive pricing.The term “managed care” refers to a variety of continually adapting and developing arrangements that involve four groups. These groups, which have been labeled by the world of business, not health, are the “consumer” (once the patient), the “provider” (the physician and other health care professionals), the “insurer” (the reimburser for any care), and the “purchaser of care” or the primary buyer of health services (the large employer organization). Capitation is a common way to pay for health services in managed care systems. A certain dollar amount is negotiated for health services for a specified number of patients whether the care is delivered or not; the provider shares with the [End Page 189] insurer any financial risk for the actual cost of care (III, Centers for Disease Control 1995).When the Clinton administration’s health care reform movement failed to gain support in the U.S. Congress, the use of managed care to control rising health care costs accelerated. The literature on managed care and its effect on the patient-physician relationship reflects this shift. During the era of health care reform, “debate centered on how managed care could control costs, on the use of technology and patient satisfaction, [and] on access and barriers to care” (IV, Emanuel and Dubler 1995). When managed care organizations began contracting with physicians to provide health care services subject to the plans’ provisions, these plans became agents in clinical decision making on a wide-spread basis. HMO enrollment grew to 51 million persons by 1994 (III, Centers for Disease Control 1995). This “corporatization” of health care has sparked a plethora of articles about the effects of the marketplace on the physician’s ability to do what is best for the patient, and on the patient’s ability to trust the physician to do so.Many authors make it clear that managed care itself is not the problem, but rather the development of for-profit managed care plans by “corporate conglomerates with billions of dollars in assets that compensate their executives as grandly as basketball players” (V, Kassirer 1995) “in a marketplace that is largely unregulated” (I, Zoloth-Dorfman and Rubin 1995). “Some, mostly older plans that were created when cost containment was an unexpected benefit rather than their central purpose, deliver high-quality care economically. Unfortunately, others cut costs by recruiting the healthiest patients, excluding the sickest, rationing care by making it inconvenient to obtain, and denying care by a variety of mechanisms” (V, Kassirer 1995).These cost-containment features now play an intimate role in clinical practice. When a managed care plan contracts with a physician, the doctor becomes a “double agent” with contractual obligations to the plan to provide a preset amount of services and professional responsibilities to each patient to authorize necessary treatment (V, Angell 1993). This duality can undermine the physician’s fiduciary responsibility to the patient wherein the physician “has power over the affairs of [the patient]...and is required by law to act on that person’s... (shrink)

Those who advocate higher out-of-pocket spending, especially high deductibles, to keep health care costs better controlled without losing quality use market language to talk about how people should think about health care. Consumers—that is, patients—should hunt for bargains. Clip coupons. Shop around. Patients need to have more “skin in the game.” Consumer-patients will then choose more carefully and prudently and use less unnecessary health care. Unfailingly, “skin” refers to having money at stake. Usually, those arguing for high deductibles express (...) dismay or frustration that patients do not face the full cost of the health services they receive. Unfortunately, a lack of price transparency, the need to unbundle bundled groups of services to discover total price, and the challenge of validly and reliably measuring and disclosing quality make shopping for health care a challenge for even the savviest patient. Urgency, fear, and sickness that impairs peak cognitive function and other aspects of emotionally laden decision-making, even when “shared” with a physician, add obstacles to coupon clipping and tire kicking. Who has more at stake in health decisions than patients? Whose flesh is literally, not just figuratively, at risk? (shrink)

Amid England’s 17th and 18th centuries, coffee’s Turkish origins catalyzed a stark polarization of coffee consumption due to Turkish xenophobia. England’s long-regarded reservations towards Turkish commodities only changed because of one revolutionary institution: the coffeehouse. Unlike classically popular taverns, coffeehouses were unique, progressive establishments where patrons of all classes and genders safely shared news, debated politics, and discussed new discoveries in academia over a beverage costing mere pennies to consume. By adopting an accessible and intellectual premise, coffeehouses eclipsed England’s xenophobic (...) predispositions towards Turkey – forever revolutionizing the social sphere and English coffee consumption. (shrink)

Global concerns over environmental and social issues in agrifood value chains have increased and are reflected in a number of voluntary sustainability standards and regulatory initiatives. However, these initiatives are often based on poor knowledge of production realities, creating a disconnect between producing and consuming countries. Through narrative analysis, this paper reveals asymmetries in the responsibilities of the various actors participating in Ecuadorian banana value chains, providing clear problem- and solution-framings. Despite the broad range of actors interviewed, our analysis reveals (...) convergence in two main narratives that reflect asymmetries amongst local actors in terms of their ability to participate, ability to maintain participation, and adaptation strategies in view of changing external factors. One narrative relates to sustainability adaptations, the cost of which is not shared among all value chain actors. This is combined with a downward trend in the price of bananas and the lack of a differentiated price to account for losses and costs arising from increasing sustainability standards. Another narrative reflects a value chain structure that threatens small-farm survival. It highlights the urgency of protecting small-farm activity by enforcing national regulation and developing new market segments/models that understand small-scale producer reality. Study results show that the multitude of standards is not seen as beneficial and that downstream actors rather wish for common minimum standards to reduce business costs. Compatibility between standards and local realities should be a priority for global sustainability standards adoption. Building on the problems and solution-framings of local value chain links, we give voice to local actors, and link their perceptions to existing literature and discursive politics while contributing to social transparency and addressing the democratic deficit in agrifood value chains. (shrink)

Purpose Google commands approximately 70 per cent of search market share worldwide, resulting in businesses investing heavily in search engine advertising on Google to target potential customers. Recently, Google changed the way in which content and ads were displayed on the search engine results page. This reshuffling of content and ads is expected to affect the advertisers who advertise on Google and/or use it to drive traffic to their websites. The purpose of this study is to analyze the impact of (...) these changes on various stakeholders. Design/methodology/approach Data have been collected from various sources on the internet including blogs and discussion forums. Netnography has been used as it allows a detailed evaluation of the consumers’ needs, wants and choices in a virtual space. Findings The average cost-per-click for ads on the top positions is expected to increase. Advertisers whose ads usually occupy the lower positions would be adversely affected. To counter this, more emphasis should be placed on ad extensions and on product listing ads. In addition, organizations would benefit from increased efforts on search engine optimization. Practical implications A variety of coping strategies have been developed that can help marketers to successfully navigate through the change, including the use of ad extensions and the use of product listing ads. Originality/value This practice-focused paper offers guidelines for digital marketers to use sponsored search more effectively as part of their arsenal in light of some important changes recently made by Google. The potential of netnography as a research methodology has also been expanded by using it in a novel setting and in drawing up actionable insights. (shrink)

From mid-2020 until early 2023, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a series of essays that, when summed up, represents a valediction for English and American literary studies as practiced during the last half century. Some of the Chronicle authors, enjoying the privilege of tenure, speak for the profession as it was in healthier times. Others, representing a younger generation of scholars, hold on to unstable teaching positions. All are disconsolate.The essays, collected on the Chronicle website, look back to those (...) earlier times to seek the reasons for today's dreary situation. In dirgelike recitations, external causes are named and excoriated: the drying up of state funding, the growth of administrative personnel at the cost of faculty positions, the reluctance of debt-ridden students to concentrate on studies not leading to jobs, and the general parental and public resistance to anything considered effete. But at least one contributor to the series, Michael Clune of Case Western Reserve University, will not permit his fellow teachers to escape whipping: “Our fuzziness about what we do raises in the minds of our publics the not unreasonable assumption that we don't know what we're doing. The crisis in the humanities requires that we be open and honest about our discipline's rationales.”What does such a call to action mean? Does Clune ask for more exacting curricular control, more agreement as to pedagogical mission, a greater consensus about certifiable merit in professional advancement? About specific alterations to the system, he is not forthcoming, and this generalization applies to most of the other contributors as well: the prognosis is clear but the cure beyond anyone's reach. Why? To propose radical changes to the humane disciplines, even when most necessary, invites deep resistance. If professors are largely political liberals, they are also pedagogical archconservatives. Clune is nevertheless right in asking fellow professors for candor about what they are doing. The one strategy that cannot work is rehearsing their woes in public. Nor can a focus on the theoretical skirmishes in which they entangle themselves create the kind of consumer demand—student demand—that is needed. Unless they can collectively devise (or recover) intellectual attractions to draw in a new generation of students and fill lecture halls and seminar seats with them, humanists will be even further shunted to the sidelines.Another essayist, herself determined to get matters straightened out and thereby save the discipline, imagines her colleagues uniting to establish a stricter definition of what they collectively should do. Hannah Walser of the Harvard Society of Fellows believes that professors teaching literary works have been all too satisfied with the wasteful art of praising or derogating the performance or rhetorical brilliance of their colleagues: “In literary studies’ more affirmative modes, elaborate assurances of our colleagues’ competence—those more-a-comment-than-a-questions that praise a talk as beautiful, brilliant, powerful, and so on—end up standing in for actual arguments about the rightness or wrongness of a claim.” Literary works do not function as truth-telling “claims,” however, but as imaginative creations entertaining both truth and falsehood, the “real” as well as the “unreal.” In order to read those creations, and to share those readings with others, teachers must agree on the empirical terms, the evidentiary tools, to use. Walser rightly wants everyone to play the same game with the same rules. Only then can teachers come to terms with literary objects whose ultimate value is determined by something direct and visceral—aesthetic pleasure. But while Walser is right to call for procedural agreement, such a call will not, by itself, entice students to return to the classroom.In another essay, Katie Kadue looks back nostalgically to a time when, in its modest way, the world of literary studies had “stars,” when the English Institute featured brilliant personages at well-attended meetings, when jobs were plentiful and seminal books about theoretical issues were everywhere discussed. To Kadue, a young scholar, such moments seem all the more dazzling and attractive by virtue of their absence today. Were “stars” again to capture collective attention, a sign would be given that the humanities could recover its health and make literary study attractive to students again.Hence the Chronicle publication concludes with portraits of two humanists, Sianne Ngai and Mark McGurl, who have gained some recognition and acclaim. Perhaps, as the Chronicle suggests, with them a new constellation of stars is coming into view.Ngai is the author of three impressive and widely discussed monographs, the most recent being Theory of the Gimmick (2020), which, with a complexity uniquely its own, asks the reader to study the mixed attraction and repulsion produced by the intrusion of a “gimmick”—something in a text that draws attention to itself and exposes the inner workings of the text. When we encounter a gimmick in a text, it provokes both suspicion and pleasure: “When we say something is a gimmick, we mean it is overrated and deceptive, that you would have to be a sucker to fall for it. Yet gimmicks exert a strange hold on us. As with a magic show, we can enjoy the gimmick even while we know we are being tricked.” Other gimmicks—arousing “small” or “minor” affects—have been overlooked or dismissed in conventional literary discourse. Ngai, entranced by them, also argues that, beyond suspicion, pleasure, and annoyance, gimmicks have the power to reveal deep cultural, economic, and political forces shaped by contemporary capitalism.Ngai's strategy is ingenious and idiosyncratic. Its apparent strength is that it can explain everything—literary, economic, political, and cultural—that comes within its range. But its very originality renders it inoperable by anyone, be it student or teacher, other than its inventor. Like Marshall McLuhan, Hugh Kenner, Leslie Fiedler, and Stanley Fish before her—each of them working with a home-grown methodology—Ngai herself is her theory. Her inimitability prevents her theoretical procedures from becoming a generally shared answer to the classroom problems of literary study.McGurl, a sociologist of textual production, readership, and consumption, is more conventional than Ngai. He is certainly more omnivorous. He is interested in everything out there for the reader or listener to acquire, high or low, bad or good, by way of book, podcast, recording, or any other means or genre. His recent book Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon shows how the company “has created the psychological and temporal conditions that not only alter how fiction is bought, sold, distributed, and read, but also how it is produced.” Might it be possible—and attractive—for teachers and students to follow and extend procedures like those of McGurl? An immense panorama of verbal matter might thereby await classroom after classroom. With much to read and much to hear, professors and students could examine and evaluate data aplenty. Might classrooms and seminar rooms once again be filled, this time by sociologists of literature? Professor Clune's query—“Why should students listen to me? What claim do I have on the public?”—could then be answered: We and you hereby claim everything written as our province; we, a new generation of humanists, will thus have work enough.Alas, for universities and colleges to make such a move—to resolve that literary study should embrace all of writing—would be to forfeit the one inestimably valuable form of intellectual capital now and forever readily available to them: that unique body of works known as literature: poetry, drama, fiction. Some professors appear to believe that this capital asset is wanting, depleted as a source, and therefore impotent to generate exciting scholarly work or teaching—which is why, for the last four or so decades, “theory” in its many varieties has proved so seductive. But theoretical discourse, derivative and secondary, proves vapid without the fiction, poetry, and drama from which it derived and on which it survives. Recognizing the rare power to be found in the works themselves and nowhere else, it is to those works that teachers must somehow return. Only then will there be compelling reason to hope that students will follow. (shrink)

This study investigates the antecedents and mechanisms of consumers’ adoption of a public bicycle-sharing scheme as a form of shared sustainable consumption. Drawing on marketing ethics and sustainability literature, it argues that cultural and consumption values drive or deter the adoption of PBSS through the mediating mechanism of ethical evaluation. This study tests its hypotheses using a sample of 755 consumers from one of the largest PBSS programs in China. The results confirm the significance of collectivism, man–nature orientation, materialism, (...) and face-consciousness as key determinants of the adoption of PBSS. Interestingly, these values play mixed roles in influencing PBSS adoption. It also finds that such values and beliefs need to be effectively translated into ethical evaluations of PBSS adoption, and need to be addressed in the specific social context. Thus, ethical evaluation constitutes a cognitive strategy that allows consumers to justify and defend their adoption of sustainability practices. The results suggest that a desirable sustainability program needs to not only cater to the cultural and psychological motivations of consumers, but also reflect the social norms and social context in which the sustainability practices and consumers are embedded. (shrink)

This chapter explores two questions in detail: How should we determine the threshold for costs that individuals are asked to bear through insurance premiums or care-related out-of-pocket costs, including user fees and copayments? and What is an adequate relationship between costs and benefits? This chapter argues that preventing impoverishment is a morally more urgent priority than protecting households against income fluctuations, and that many health insurance plans may not adequately protect individuals from health care costs that threaten to drop their (...) financial status below a decent minimum. A design that places greater emphasis on preventing impoverishment and finances the achievement of that goal by reducing unnecessary subsidies to better-off households would better accord with a sufficientarian approach to health care. -/- . (shrink)

In recent years, the concepts of charity and development aid have changed significantly. Present concepts combine direct money transfer with co-production, knowledge sharing and the development of products and services designed for the need of developing and transition economies. The concept of micro-financing is a financial service which has proven to allow for entrepreneurs in the respective countries to start up their businesses. A relatively new financial product for these countries is micro-insurance. This article deals with the question whether (...) consumers in the Netherlands are willing to donate micro-insurances and which factors influence this willingness to contribute to the non-profit micro-insurance approach of an insurance company. The data were collected with questionnaires among a sample of the Dutch population. The data have been processed in a one-way between-groups ANOVA, a paired sample t test and an ordinal regression analysis. The results show that approximately half of the Dutch consumers are willing to pay an additional amount on their insurance premium for the donation of micro-insurances. The amount of the insurance premium did, however, not affect the willingness to donate. If consumers could choose the beneficiary less people are willing to donate, yet those people are willing to donate more money. In conclusion, there is readiness among consumers to contribute to micro-insurance via an insurance company that assists in setting up micro-insurance projects. This indicates a possible role for companies to act as an intermediary between philanthropic acts and consumers. (shrink)

This paper presents quantitative data on altruistic cooperation during food acquisition by Ache foragers. Cooperative activities are defined as those that entail a cost of time and energy to the donor but primarily lead to an increase in the foraging success of the recipient. Data show that Ache men and women spend about 10% of all foraging time engaged in altruistic cooperation on average, and that on some days they may spend more than 50% of their foraging time in (...) such activities. The most time-consuming cooperative activity for both sexes is helping during the pursuit of game animals, a pattern that is probably linked to the widespread sharing of game by Ache foragers. Cooperative food acquisition and subsequent food redistribution in hunter-gatherer societies are critical behaviors that probably helped shape universal, evolved, cooperative tendencies that are well illustrated in modern experimental economics. (shrink)

The combination of decreased genotyping costs and prolific social media use is fueling a personal genetic testing industry in which consumers purchase and interact with genetic risk information online. Consumers and their genetic risk profiles are protected in some respects by the 2008 federal Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA), which forbids the discriminatory use of genetic information by employers and health insurers; however, practical and technical limitations undermine its enforceability, given the everyday practices of online social networking and its impact (...) on the workplace. In the Web 2.0 era, employers in most states can legally search about job candidates and employees online, probing social networking sites for personal information that might bear on hiring and employment decisions. We examine GINA's protections for online sharing of genetic information as well as its limitations, and propose policy recommendations to address current gaps that leave employees? genetic information vulnerable in a Web-based world. (shrink)

Collaborative consumption is proposed as a potential step beyond unsustainable linear consumption patterns toward more sustainable consumption practices. Despite mounting interest in the topic, little is known about the determinants of this consumer behavior. We use an extended theory of planned behavior to examine the relative influence of consumers’ personal norms and the theory’s basic sociopsychological variables attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control on collaborative consumption. Moreover, we use this framework to examine consumers’ underlying value and belief structure (...) regarding collaborative consumption. We measure these aspects for 224 consumers in a survey and then assess their self-reported collaborative consumption behavior in a second survey. Our structural model fits the data well. Collaborative consumption is more strongly—through intentions—influenced by personal norms and attitudes than by subjective norms. Personal norms to consume collaboratively are determined by consumers’ altruistic, biospheric, and egoistic value orientations. Cost savings, efficient use of resources, and community with others are found to be consumers’ attitudinal beliefs underlying collaborative consumption. We conclude that collaborative consumption can be pin-pointed neither as a mere form of economic exchange nor as a primarily normative form of sharing resources. Instead, collaborative consumption is determined by economic/egoistic (e.g., cost savings) and normative (e.g., altruistic and biospheric value orientations) motives. Implications for collaborative consumption research, the theory of planned behavior, and practitioners are discussed. (shrink)

It is commonly thought that when democratic states act wrongly, they should bear the costs of the harm they cause. However, since states are collective agents, their financial burdens pass on to their individual citizens. This fact raises important questions about the proper distribution of the state’s collective responsibility for its unjust policies. This article identifies two opposing models for sharing this collective responsibility in democracies: first, in proportion to citizens’ personal association with the unjust policy; second, by giving (...) each citizen an equal share of the costs. Proportional distribution is compatible with the principle of fairness. And yet, both in the literature and in political praxis we find many supporters for the equal sharing of the costs of unjust policies in democracies. How can equal distribution be defended on normative grounds? This article develops a defense that is grounded in citizens’ associative obligations. I argue that, at least in some democracies, one of the intrinsic values of the civic bond revolves around the joint formation and execution of worthy political goals. This social good generates the political associative obligation to accept an equal distribution of the costs of unjust policies. (shrink)

Decision-making regarding healthcare expenditure hinges heavily on an individual's health status and the certainty about the future. This study uses data on propensity of general health exam (GHE) spending to show that despite the debate on the necessity of GHE, its objective is clear—to obtain more information and certainty about one’s health so as to minimise future risks. Most studies on this topic, however, focus only on factors associated with GHE uptake and overlook the shifts in behaviours and attitudes regarding (...) different levels of cost. To fill the gap, this study analyses a dataset of 2068 subjects collected from Hanoi (Vietnam) and its vicinities using the baseline-category logit method. We evaluate the sensitivity of Vietnamese healthcare consumers against two groups of factors (demographic and socioeconomic-cognitive) regarding payment for periodic GHE, which is not covered by insurance. Our study shows that uninsured, married and employed individuals are less sensitive to cost than their counterparts because they value the information in reducing future health uncertainty. The empirical results challenge the objections to periodic health screening by highlighting its utility. The relevance of behavioural economics is further highlighted through a look at the bounded rationality of healthcare consumers and private insurance companies in using and providing the service, respectively. (shrink)

The topic of my thesis is individual and collective responsibility for collectively caused systemic harms, with climate change as the case study. Can an individual be responsible for these harms, and if so, how? Furthermore, what does it mean to say that a collective is responsible? A related question, and the second main theme, is how ignorance and knowledge affect our responsibility. -/- My aim is to show that despite the various complexities involved, an individual can have responsibility to address (...) climate change. I argue that climate change is not a problem just for states and international bodies, but also for individuals. There are three possible sources of moral responsibility for individuals in relation to climate change harms: direct responsibility (individuals qua individuals), shared responsibility as members (individuals qua members of collective agents), and shared responsibility as constituents (individuals qua constituents of unorganised collectives). -/- Accounts that deny individual responsibility fail to either take our interdependent reality seriously or fail to understand marginal participation (or in the case direct responsibility, fail to appreciate the nature of the climate change phenomenon). Individuals can be complicit in climate change harms, either as members of collective agents (e.g. as citizens of states or employees of a corporation) or as constituents of unorganised collectives (e.g. as consumers or polluters). -/- Although I focus on individual complicity, I do not deny the obligations of collective agents. However, nation-states, governments, and international bodies are not the only relevant collective agents in climate ethics: other collective agents, such as corporations, matter also and can have obligations concerning making sure that their activities are as carbon-neutral as possible. In addition, those corporations that have engaged in lobbying against climate regulation through creating and disseminating misleading information have acquired themselves additional obligations to mitigate climate change and compensate for the harm they have caused. Even so, the ethical claims can only be understood by individual members of these collective agents because only they can feel the pull of moral claims. I suggest that we could distinguish between what one must possess in order to be capable of making moral claims (i.e. moral agency conditions), and what it means to have the ability to exhibit such claims through one’s conduct. -/- Individual direct responsibility is to not to increase the probable risk of serious harm to other people, at least as long as we can do so at a less than significant cost to ourselves. It is limited to relatively wealthy individuals. Offsetting is not a reliable way to meet this duty; we need to look at the emissions from our lifestyle choices (within the available infrastructure). Shared responsibility qua members of collective agents is the key individual responsibility, and it presses especially on those occupying key positions within key collective agents. Saying that, our shared responsibility qua constituents of unorganised collectives has the potential to be decisive in whether some action is taken or not, either through a set of actions that can signal certain acceptance or support, or as a form of political support from the grass roots. (shrink)

The moral economy of American medicine has been transformed by contentious innovations in organization, administration, regulation, and finance. In many settings old fee-for-service incentives and disincentives have been replaced by those of ``managed care,'' while in other settings they have been diluted or distorted. In the everyday care of patients, old and new may alternate or interact. These innovations may also be having secondary effects on participation in life-sciences research and the development and employment of new technologies, discouraging collective support (...) for preliminary investigation and delaying adoption of improved goods and services until cost-reducing potential has already been realized. This motivational complexity, particularly in its moral dimensions, is hard to address using standard assumptions and methods. I argue for different assumptions, based on the clinical behavior of individual patients rather than the market behavior of aggregated consumers, and I describe a different method, based on an old idea in political economy. I then present a new way to explain the core obligations of clinicians, researchers, and planners and to interpret the policy problems they must now share. (shrink)

June 2022 A Revolutionary New Metaphysics, Based on Consciousness, and a Call to All Philosophers We are in a unique moment of our history unlike any previous moment ever. Virtually all human economies are based on the destruction of the Earth, and we are now at a place in our history where we can foresee if we continue on as we are, our own extinction. As I write, the planet is in deep trouble, heat, fires, great storms, and record flooding, (...) weather patterns drastic everywhere. Capitalism has been so successful in supplying us with an endless array of consumer items, that we have never noticed there is a cost. But there is a cost, the cost is the very life of the Earth herself, and now the day of reckoning is here. Days of reckoning are most often days of rath. But I am hoping that this is a day of major Awakening over the entire planet. We have caused a crisis so great for the Earth we can hardly get our minds around it. But I am proposing that deeply embedded in the crisis are ideas, about who and what the Earth is, Ourselves, and what we are here for. I am proposing that this is a call to all philosophy and philosophers to rethink ourselves from the ground up. The human race has never gotten the Earth right and now we must, for the Earth is the true foundation for civilization. We are in deep trouble with the Earth, and it owes to the fact that the great male thinkers never got the Earth right, they could never make the connection between the life of mind and the life of the Earth. I am proposing that deeply embedded in the crisis we are in are ideas. And that in fact the planet is in the grip of a false metaphysics, and scientific image of nature that really comes most recently from Descartes. His conviction that matter, and with it the Earth, are simply the weighable, the measurable the extended in space and time, utterly devoid of any inner life of mind thoughts or Consciousness. This view of matter and the Earth goes back to the very dawn of thought, Descartes is just its most recent and comprehensive version of things. This view of matter is really a false metaphysics that dominates most of the modern world and underpins the whole scientific image of nature itself. I am proposing this is a false metaphysics and offering a new version of things based on Consciousness. If there is a single idea fueling and driving the destruction of the planet, it is the conviction that the Earth is something without Consciousness. When you intend to ravage and savage the planet, turn it into consumer items to be converted into money in the bank, first pretend that all of the bright beings in the natural world are devoid of Consciousness, just “things” you do not have to have any conscious about destroying them. I am proposing that this term Consciousness, that has appeared as term and a problem for modern science, is the key to getting ourselves right with the Earth. I propose this new theory for science will ramify into every other disciplines as well, and the ways we think just about everything. This old paradigm based on a false theory of matter, has run its course, it has brought us to the brink of our own extinction. We need new ideas, and we need them now. You will find my recent work in the Scientific God Journal under the title: Consciousness as the Organizing Principle, and a very complete version of my arguments for this term Consciousness, along with radical reinterpretation of modern science itself, on the Galileo Commission site. It is a radical moment for all of the thinkers among us, take this as my small contribution to rethinking ourselves in new terms, based on my understanding that the true basis for the whole of Being, the Universe, the Cosmos, and with them Ourselves, is this term Consciousness. And unpack it. And I predict that with this term Consciousness every intractable human problem in both science and the modern world will go down like a line of dominos before it. And so, here are a few new ideas I would offer you. These are the times of the Reappearance of the Feminine, a great Awakening as of Springtime after a long dark and lonely Winter. We are leaving behind us an old civilization based on male dominance, fear lies and control, now in decay, disease, and death disintegrating all around us. We are moving into a whole new civilization based on Love and Truth. A new civilization requires new basic terms values and first principles. And so, I return to Descartes. 1. Just over 300 years ago a young man travelling with the army found himself stranded in a foreign town in a bare room lit by a candle with nothing to do but think. And in a couple of nights Descartes laid the entire thought foundations for modern science and most of the modern world. It isn’t clear that modern philosophers with their funding sources of grants, their graduate students, their reputation and all the perks and privileges of academia can do any better. Descartes claimed there are just two principles in the Universe, Matter and Mind. God was pure mind; human beings were mind and matter. And we are the only ones on the planet with mind. Everything else all of the bright array of beings who share the planet with us are simply matter. And matter? The weighable the measurable the extended in space and time utterly devoid of any inner life of thoughts, feelings, or Consciousness This classification was a boon for developing science. Scientists did not have to worry about any inner life in nature, ideas or Consciousness, they could just set about weighing and measuring, as they have until the present day. But it was a disaster for the Earth. Earth was once worshiped as a Goddess. With Descartes she became almost overnight “things.” Simply commodities and resources, an endless of supply of consumer items, to be turned into money in the bank. And now Descartes concept of matter is up for us. If there is a single idea that is enabling and driving the destruction of the Earth, it is the conviction that Earth is something without Consciousness. This whole scientific image of nature as something devoid of Consciousness is driving the destruction of the Earth, and driving us all insane, and it needs to change. Ever since Descartes formulated Dualism, scientists and philosophers have been trying to get rid of it. They have done this by attempting to make matter the fundamental term of reality, and to explain mind or Consciousness in terms of matter. And now, Consciousness has emerged as term and a problem for modern science. 2. The prevailing Universe picture has been mainly based on the belief that Consciousness appears only at the end of evolution in ourselves and some of the higher animals when matter attains “a certain state of complexity” and it is produced by neurons in the brain. But Consciousness is nothing real in itself, the neurons are doing the work, Consciousness is simply a byproduct of neural activity. As William James summed up this position, not his: Consciousness is to the brain as a shadow to the runner, it runs beside him but never influences his stride. And so, the great problem of neuroscience: How do neurons produce Consciousness? So far, no one has been able to say how. All we have is parallelism. Two processes are running in parallel a train of neural events and a train of Consciousness events. And so, which one is primary? The face of neuroscience and much of the modern world is that the neural events are what is really real, Consciousness is secondary. The conviction that Consciousness is something produced by neurons is so deeply held and has been so for so long, that it seems like an obvious fact. It is in fact an assumption and a theory, and it could all well be the other way around. The scientific image of nature as something devoid of Consciousness is now up for us. It has enabled the destruction of the Earth, and we are now at a unique place in our own evolution where we can foresee if we continue on as we are, our own extinction. And so, there are the best reasons for rethinking Descartes concepts of matter. Scientists and philosophers have been trying to escape dualism by making matter the fundamental term. And now, this has not worked. In a nutshell: The mind body problem, the “hard problem of Consciousness” ---how do neurons in the brain, atoms and molecules give rise to ideas thoughts and feelings and who what and where is the “I” who sees them? And then, the near-death experience. I remind you of the truth of the near-death experience. The body in the bed is brain dead eeg flat, but the patient, pure Consciousness is hovering at the ceiling watching the doctors work over the body below, able to read dials he could not have seen from the bed, sometimes able to events in the corridor beyond the room, all subsequently confirmed by the doctors. Evidence as good as it gets that the patient really was out of his body. And so, the patient is able to see without eyes, hear without ears and to think and remember without a brain. There is not a single scientific principle that can account for this. And I am proposing that the near-death experience is a threshold and a key for a much deeper understanding of the Universe. These three problems are so hard they cannot be solved by present scientific principles and therefore call all present principles and ways of thought into question. When your axioms cannot account for the data, it is time to drop them and find better fundamental terms. We have not been able to solve the problems of Consciousness with the assumption that matter is the most basic and fundamental term. And so, if Cartesian dualism is to be overcome at all, we need to try it the other way around. 3. We are in the position of Copernicus. Remember Copernicus? He was making his calculations on the assumption that the Earth was the center of the Universe until they became so unwieldy that he decided to try it all the other way around. To make the sun the center, the Earth revolving around it. And lo, all of his data fell neatly into place. I am proposing a whole new Universe picture. Evolution makes us continuous with every other being, Consciousness would not be in us if it were not in them also, and then, in the atoms and molecules and cells that make up living beings. I propose to make Consciousness the most basic term and see what follows. I am in fact, proposing a new Copernican Revolution, that Consciousness is the true basis for the Universe and the right fundamental term, for science itself all other disciplines as well, and the whole of the modern world. And I predict that every intractable problem in science or the modern world, will go down like a line of dominos before it. In a nutshell: Consciousness and not matter is “first and fundamental” in the Universe, it is there from the very “Beginning” everything has it and all of the true causalities, the explanatory principles belong to it. Not to matter. What then is matter? All matter is an Appearance of something much more real, Consciousness. All matter is an expression of Consciousness, even the least little bit of matter contains Consciousness, and is an expression of Consciousness. And so, we revise the scientific image of nature. Science at present is two termed, matter/energy. It needs to become three termed: Matter/energy/Consciousness, with the recognition that all of the basic principles, the true causalities of events, and of the Universe belong to Consciousness. And now physics. To accommodate this new Universe picture physics needs to alter just one term, energy. All energy contains Consciousness, that idea alone will change our world forever. The animals the trees the plants are just as conscious as we are, as is the Earth herself, a continuum of many forms of Consciousness of which our own is one. The Earth consists of interacting and intersecting forms of Consciousness, Consciousness within Consciousness within Consciousness within Consciousness. A remarkable work has just appeared entitled “Beyond Words What Animals Feel and Think.” Describing in detail how like ourselves all of the animals are. And the more we can see how like us everything else really is, the harder it will be for us to do them all in, in the interest of turning them into consumer items. And so, here is a new principle of understanding, that entails completely new forms of explanation, and a whole new Universe picture to be spelled out in terms of Consciousness and its various properties. This is a Universe that is aware awake and Enspirited throughout. And so, there is only one principle, not two. And so, how does Consciousness work? There is “no mind/body problem.” My Consciousness is aligning the Consciousness of neurons in the brain, that aligns the Consciousness of all other cells in the body, that aligns the Consciousness of molecules and atoms themselves. Mainly from the top down, but also interactive, and not reduction to the purely physical forces. 4. And so, here is a radical new Universe picture, and with it a new way to think about the Universe itself, the Earth, Ourselves, and Spirit. It requires a complete revision of both of the terms of modern science itself. The problem of the modern world owes in deep measure to Descartes concept of matter as something devoid of interior life. But he is only the most powerful and simple expression of a whole tradition of thought that predates him, that goes back to the very dawn of thought itself. It owes to the conviction of both Plato and Aristotle that the Earth was something devoid of reason, or mind, and therefore something to be held in complete contempt. We are emerging from a civilization based on contempt for the Earth, and down the road, it will become contempt for the body, sex, women, the Native people, and people of color everywhere. And so, this entire tradition is now up for us, it has brought us to the brink of our own extinction, and we need to get beyond it. I am proposing that this term Consciousness is the way out. The missing piece of the puzzle and the idea whose time has come. And it will enable us to move into a completely new civilization based on respect for the Earth, women, sex, people of color, that honors everyone and has a place for all. Revolutions in science occur when new data show up that cannot be accounted for by existing paradigms (Thomas Kuhns: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). Consciousness, and all the properties and problems of Consciousness are just such data, and they compel a new scientific revolution. But we are a scientific age. A new Copernican revolution in science is such as revolution everywhere. And Consciousness is the key to getting every other reality at all levels and depths right as well. It will enable us finally to get the Earth right, get ourselves right with the Earth, and with one another. Archimedes: Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world. I am proposing a new synthesis among our fundamental terms in which this term Consciousness is the new lynchpin. And so, I return once more to Descartes. Descartes in the Mediations was a dualist, they were two realities interacting in the pineal gland mind and body. But Descartes age was high on “Cartesianisms,” on Descartes concept of matter. Animals were simply cleverly wired machines (Hobbes called them automata). Rumor had it that Descartes followers went about kicking dogs reasoning that their howls were not due to any feelings of pain, but simply the wiring of the machine. We have been doing this to the Earth ever since, and now the Earth is not going to stand for it any longer. It is time we all woke up. There is no matter in Descartes sense of it, or in Plato and Aristotle’s sense of it. This old concept of matter is embedded in all of the crisis and catastrophes---fires, drought, pandemics, over population, the disintegrating economies, our ways of life, capitalism and consumerism themselves. All matter is Enspirited, contains Consciousness, and is an expression of Consciousness. Now I tell you something about Descartes you may not know. In the Mediations was a dualist, there are minds and bodies. But by the end of his life, he knew the truth. Descartes guided his whole life by these vivid dreams, and toward the end of his life he had this dream: He saw the Universe as a giant machine and in the heart of the machine propelling the whole, was Consciousness. And so, out of the shades and shadows and into the light of day. Here is a renewed and a new science, a new cosmology. And with it, a revolutionary new metaphysics. The whole of the modern world is in the grip of a false metaphysics, based on Descartes theory of matter. Here is a new, and finally true metaphysics based on the single term, Consciousness. 5. And in all my works, I spell out this new metaphysics based on Consciousness, and what it means for how we think about virtually everything: The Universe, the Earth, Ourselves, and Spirit. Of who, what and where Spirit is, that we may connect with Spirit everywhere. There is only one term for the Universe, and not two, this single term Consciousness, that manifests itself in two modes: Consciousness in Form, Consciousness Formless. And so, here is a sketch of what this new term Consciousness really means. For four great aspects of the real, four new cornerstones for a whole new civilization on Earth, based on Love and Truth. A. For the Universe: New causalities, all matter is an expression of Consciousness, awake and aware, Enspirited throughout, which has a place for the causalities of love ideas intent plan and purpose, what Aristotle called final causality, that for the sake of which. And it has a place for subjectivity, the greatest mystery in the whole of the Universe, knowable only in ourselves, but there in everything else as well, bedrock in the chain of causalities. The buck stops here. Here are two very different Universe pictures. The Cartesian Universe consists of things, pushed, and pulled around by the physical forces that function blind. The true Universe consists of selves and not things. Selves at least in ourselves, are organized and focused about an I, an I am, or a sense of self in everything, ever other being dear to itself. Just one aspect of subjectivity. And so, it is Consciousness all the way down, and subjectivity all the way down. Science proceeds on the basis of the negligible of what it can leave out as unimportant. Subjectivity is the ultimate animating principle of the Universe. What Descartes really did was to strip from nature what is most essential about it, its animating principle Consciousness. And so, we come out of a long history of “clunk.” The great male thinkers have killed creation. First in concepts and now in the lived life. And so, after centuries of fruitless search, not all of it in vain, finally, and just in time the true basic principle for the Universe has shown up in virtually all disciplines, this term Consciousness. B. And so, the Earth: What does this term Consciousness really mean for the Earth? It means that all of the bright array of beings around us have Consciousness. And the more we can realize how like us they are, the harder it will be to do them all in. Is this what it really means to be “made in the image of Spirit?” To destroy ever other living being? The god of Genesis is a creator god who has created billions and billions of living forms. Man, taking himself to be made in the image of Spirit has destroyed virtually all of it. The Earth is not things, not commodities and resources, not an endless array of consumer goods. The Earth consists of conscious living spiritual beings like ourselves, who need to be honored and respected, nurtured and cared for, to be Loved. And if the human race can finally pull it off and bring Love here and start helping the Earth rather than destroying her, even our vast numbers now at 8 billion, may not matter. Deeply embedded in the modern world is a false cosmology based on the hitherto useful but ultimately false metaphysics of Descartes. In particular it owes to Descartes concepts of matter, and of the Earth, as something devoid of Consciousness. And now this concept is up for us. If there is a single idea enabling and driving the destruction of the planet, it is the conviction that the Earth is something devoid of Consciousness. And we all have a vested interest in keeping this false concept in place. When you intend to ravage and savage the Earth, to turn it into consumer items, and money in the bank, first pretend she has no Consciousness that way we need not have any conscious about it. We are in deep trouble with the planet. Virtually all human economies are based on the destruction of the Earth, and we are now at a place in our history where we can foresee if we continue on as we are, our own extinction. And so, here are a few new guiding principles for the planet, based on Consciousness. Consciousness has field properties. The Earth is Consciousness throughout, connected and interconnected throughout, intersecting and interacting fields of Consciousness of which our own is one. To harm one is to harm all. Only this understanding of the Earth can set our destructive technologies, and capitalism, their goals, and their limits. The real problem with capitalism, and with civilization itself is it has no true understanding of the Earth, all the exquisite networks and webworks that connect all beings with one another. Nor it is about to admit that the Earth is our “life support system,” reason gone insane in the modern world. We are destroying our life support system, capitalism is the full expression of the human death wish in the modern world, and it needs to change. And now, let the barriers between ourselves and all other beings go down. C. And so, Ourselves. This new Universe picture based on Consciousness opens into and has a place for new concepts of human identity. In particular, it has a place for reincarnation, a process whereby one Consciousness dons’ bodies again and again and lays them down. This is a process wholly impossible on materialistic theories. This new view of things puts a higher perspective on Freudian determinism, which is a partial knowing in a greater account. We are something more than the victims of genes drives and childhood. We are immortally eternal evolving spiritual beings who take on a cycle of earthly lives in order to achieve certain goals and abilities, and then, our earthly cycle complete, we depart the Earth plane for other areas of the Universe physical or purely spiritual, to continue our evolution elsewhere. The scientific evidence for reincarnation is increasing on all sides, see for example the work of Michael Newton, a mainstream scientist forced to confront the fact of reincarnation. A completely new reincarnational picture is now emerging everywhere. We choose our parents for abilities we could acquire through them. We all come here with reasons for being here, and we all have free will, an original property of Consciousness, and we work out our issues accordingly. We all come here with the same reason for being here. It is to experience the Earth plane and human society at all levels and depths, in every social role, every climate, both sexes male and female and in all races. We are all here to acquire a deep understanding of the Earth plane with all its challenges and all of its present problems. We are not here to devour and consume the Earth, but to honor her for the learning experience she makes available for us. And so, reincarnation is the great equalizer, the fundamental basis for any bill of rights. Many of the problems of the modern world owe to the fact that reincarnation has not been taught in the West. Reincarnation was the center piece of Jesus teachings. It was banned by a fourth century council that decided the populous could best be controlled through fear. They edited all mention of reincarnation from the scriptures, and inserted fear terms instead, a judgmental god, and so on. If reincarnation had been taught, there would have been no suppression of women, but the gift of both sexes would have been honored and developed. And there would have been no reason for contempt for people of color because who they are, we have been or will be. There is no reason to look down on anyone when we know that our own identity includes membership in theirs. The truth of reincarnation needs to be the foundation for getting ourselves right with the Earth, and with one another. D. And so, Spirit. This new Universe picture, based on Consciousness, has a place for Spirit as simply Infinite Consciousness. All universes all worlds are formed out of this Consciousness, divine and sacred throughout. And Spirit is everywhere in the Earth and can be connected everywhere. And the Native North American people had things right. Everything has its own Spirit, and without contradiction is also an expression of Spirit. And what I am really doing in terms of concepts of modern science is presenting the Native North American version of the Real. And this new Universe picture has a place for the essential insight of all religions almost smothered by church tradition: Love. Not an emotion but a great Oneness, that can be found everywhere, even in a busy city street. But especially in the Earth, that is levels and depths of Oneness everywhere. And so, for the first time in their long and bitter antagonistic history, science and religion now share a common base with this term Spirit, the lynchpin in a new conceptual framework. And I offer an interpretation of where we are in our history, this present moment of historical grace, and these tumultuous times in which we live, the return of the Goddess and the Divine Feminine, the Reappearance of the Feminine in history, the Advent of Women, this great Awakening, as of Springtime after a long dark Winter, the Awakening, the Second Coming. And so, stay tuned! (shrink)