Cato

One of the most compelling features of postwar economic history is the continued prevalence of global poverty. Its intransigence is striking given the fact that development has been one of the main items on the international agenda since the end of World War II. The United Nations has numerous branches devoted entirely to reducing poverty, and both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have spent billions of dollars to promote development. Many wealthy nations also have government departments devoted to devel-opment assistance, and the amount of cash and in-kind transfers these countries have disbursed over the years is substantial. After over half a century of such efforts, success has been scattered and slow, especially given the optimism that was so prevalent in the 1950s. If a dollar a day or less in income is used as the standard of poverty, the United Nations (2002) reports that the percentage of poor people in all developing countries fell between 1987 and 1999 f...

The Argentine economy suffered a deep crisis during 2001 and 2002. Poverty stretched to one in every three homesteads in the suburbs of Buenos Aires, and the traumatic departure from convertibility, together with financial crisis and default (public debt default), undermined investor confidence, both local and foreign. Causes of the Crisis We believe the crisis owed its existence to four main causes: (1) inappropriate fiscal policy, (2) wage and price rigidities inconsistent with a fixed exchange regime, (3) a considerable, adverse external shock, and (4) political turmoil. Two-Tiered Fiscal Inconsistency On one side, public expenditure growth measured in U.S. dollars outpaced GDP growth, corrected by tradable-goods prices. On the other, the federal and provincial primary fiscal surplus did not rise at an equal pace with the hike in the financial burden linked to growing debt and the gradual phasing out of preferential-rate bonds (Brady bonds and others issued to cancel government l...

The article examines two expressions for the new moon in Latin, luna silens and luna sicca (or  sitiens). Despite the unusual imagery behind the choice of these epithets, the expressions appear  in unremarkable, technical contexts (mostly, in works on agriculture by Cato, Columella,  Pliny the Elder) and denote this particular phase of the lunar cycle without any indication  that the metaphors were perceived by speakers. The paper aims at explaining this paradox.  It is shown that neither of these expressions was based on superstitions or popular lore. They  reflected, in fact, an attempt to present the phase of the lunar cycle when the moon is invisible  in contrast to other visible phases, which are easier to identify. Thus, luna silens was created by  opposition to luna crescens “the waxing moon”, as denoting the moment before active, visible  growth will begin. Luna sicca, on the other hand, was created by opposition to luna plena, “the  full moon”, where the moon would be imagined as a vessel, gradually filled to its fullness by  white light. Finally, luna sitiens was an expression, synonymic to luna sicca, created by analogy  with luna silens. While these expressions were used as terms without any artistic effect,  Augustan poets seem to have recognized their poetic potential and, on some occasions, put it  to use (in particular, Verg. Aen. 2, 255 and Prop. 2, 17, 15).

Economic analyses of bureaucracy have charged that public pro- duction tends to be more costly than optimal;’ the extra cost may be due to either technological or allocational ineuficiency.2 Conversely, the standard theory of regulation asserts that regulated industries produce too little and, behind barriers to entry, obtain monopoly rents on their suboptimal output levels;3 Stigler and Posner have also argued that regulated industries tend to capture their regula- tory agencies so that policies are made on behalf of the industries rather than to promote the commonweal.~Both of these hypotheses are based on the premise that decision makers, whether in private firms or in public agencies, are wealth maximizers and that non- optimal decisions made by the public officials are a result of inappropriate incentives. In particular, while private wealth maxi- mization efficiently allocates resources in the private sector through profit seeking, in the public sector it leads to inefficien...

Corruption, defined as the misuse of public power (office) for private benefit, is most likely to occur where public and private sec-tors meet. In other words, it occurs where public officials have a direct responsibility for the provision of a public service or application of specific ...

PROSODY AND ORALITY IN CATO’S PRAYERS
Neal Wiley

The language of pre-literate Rome is almost completely lost to us. Lacking an intact corpus of native oral or semi-oral poetry analogous to Homer’s Greek epics, the Sanskrit Mahabharata or the Finnish Kalevala, our samples of old Latin oral verse are limited to scant epigraphical evidence and largely disjointed Saturnian fragments of poets like Livius Andronicus and Naevius. In the interest of expanding the corpus of oral Latin, in this paper I will explore the prosody of the four prayers quoted in Cato the Elder’s work De Agri Cultura, with the eventual goal of demonstrating their orality. As such, I believe them to be fragments of an older, pre-literate period of oral composition.
To establish a link between Cato’s prayers (De Agri Cultura §§132, 134, 139 and 141), I will analyze the scansion of their stress and quantitative meters, according to the methods of analysis set forth in Jeb Parsons’ 1999 article “A New Approach to the Saturnian Verse and Its Relation to Latin Prosody.” In this article, Parsons postulates a convincing theory for systematically deciphering the meter of the long-elusive old Latin Saturnian verses using system of scansion based on the bimoraic trochee. This consists of a metron with a length of two units, or morae, the first of which (or leftmost) being most prominent. For instance, either two short syllables (each of one mora) with the accent on the first, or one accented syllable, two morae long.
This system has been successfully applied to Cato’s prayers before, at least to a limited degree, in Angelo Mercado’s work on the Indo-European roots of Italic verse and meter. I intend however to fully analyze all four of Cato’s prayers and by demonstrating their systematic prosody to connect them to the specifically Saturnian framework of oral poetry in Latin, rather than to the broader Italic and Indo-European world as Mercado has done.
Once a link is established and the relationship of Cato’s prayers to oral poetry has been determined, it will be important to analyze the mechanisms of oral poetry found within the prayers. For this task, Parry’s foundational work on the subject will be of the highest import. I hope to be able to conduct the same sort of analysis of Cato’s prayers as Parry did of Homeric verse, illuminating the methods of composition and how they affect form and content of the text that we have today. Likewise, the work of such scholars as Athanassakis and Pentikäinen on the origins of Hesiod’s works and the Kalevala respectively will provide parallel examples of the nature of oral verse in other works and cultures.
In short, by analyzing the prosody of portions of the De Agri Cultura, I will demonstrate the metrical nature of these sections and further that they were composed as part of an oral tradition which is older than the literary framework in which they are recorded.


WORKING BIBLIOGRAPHY


Hesiod, and Apostolos Athanassakis. Theogony, Works and Days, Shield. 2nd ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.
Mercado, Angelo. The Latin Saturnian and Italic Verse. UCLA: Dissertation, 2006.
Parry, Milman. The Making of Homeric Verse: the collected papers of Milman Parry. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.
Parsons, Jed. “A New Approach to the Saturnian Verse and Its Relation to Latin Prosody.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 129 (1999): 117.
Pentikäinen, Juha. Kalevala mythology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.

This article explores Dante’s engagement with medieval discourses related to the marvelous.  The notion played a role in debates about theology, philosophy, history, ethics, literature, and the emotions.  The essay focuses especially on how Augustine’s views of the marvelous influenced theologians, historians, and authors of literature to consider the dignity of daily existence, domestic life, and local realities.  It also explores how writers like Dante drew on Augustinian thought to promote tolerance.  Inferno XIV–XVI are discussed in detail, but other cantos conceptually related to these are also considered.

When I attended graduate school in economics at Yale, one of my professors, Henry Wallich, in 1960 published a book entitled The Cost of Freedom. This book reflected the conventional wisdom of the time that appeared also in the leading textbooks in economics: to achieve lower unemployment, higher economic growth and a more equitable distribution of income, governments have to

Waste, fraud, and abuse in federal health care programs are serious problems, but so are the federal government's efforts to combat them. There are egregious cases of fraud, and those engaged in these criminal activities should be stopped and prosecuted. But an expanding dragnet for "health care criminals" is threatening and intimidating innocent doctors as well. It is creating an unhealthy climate of fear and defensiveness that is having an adverse impact on the medical profession. In its zeal to rid the nation's health care system of waste, fraud, and abuse, Congress has passed a blizzard of new federal criminal statutes targeting the health care industry, including those contained in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996. Congress created new "health care" laws on top of the existing mountain of rules and regulations and funded an army of enforcement agents. The statutes are being enforced by hundreds of federal agents...

Emerging market financial crises are characterized by an abrupt and significant shift from net capital inflow to net capital outflow from one year to the next. By this standard, we find 10 cases of significant financial crisis among the middle-income developing countries in the past four years: Turkey 1994, Venezuela 1994, Argentina 1995, Mexico 1994-95, Indonesia 1997-98, Korea 1997-98, Malaysia

The value of government debt relative to the size of the economy has become a serious problem, and the problem is likely to grow in the future. Total debt of the U.S. government relative to gross domestic product increased substantially since the financial crisis and the Great Recession that began in 2007, but the debt ratio has been increasing since 2001. Gross debt relative to GDP increased from 55 percent in 2001 to 67 percent in 2007 to 107 percent in 2012 Comparable figures for debt held by the public (net debt or gross debt minus debt held by various government agencies) were 80 percent in 2011 and 84 percent in May 2012 (IMF 2012). As a result, the debt ratio is now the highest in U.S. history, except for World War II, when it reached 125 percent of GDP (Bohn 2010). U.S. debt is also high relative to the debt of other high-income countries, and projections of future debt place the U.S. government among the world’s largest debtors (IMF 2011, 2012; Evans et al. 2012). Gross deb...

The failure of the World Trade Organization ministerial summit late last year has thrown the future course of trade liberalization onto an uncertain track. Added to this uncertainty is increasing criticism of the WTO itself, and not just from the anti-globalization protesters who congregated in Seattle. Some of those who embrace the cause of trade liberalization also have questioned the efficiency of the multi- lateral negotiations approach, suggesting that either unilateral or regional trade agreements may be more efficacious in achieving lower trade barriers. This article makes the case for the WTO, a limited case but (one hopes) a compelling one nonetheless. That case is in large measure political, and one needs a historical perspective on U.S. trade policy to appreciate that political case. The article then discusses the limits to what can be achieved through the WTO.

Two developments in the 1980s revived interest in growth theory and modified the way most economists study the determinants of growth. First, the contributions by Romer (1986) and Lucas (1988) launched a host of new growth models that abandoned the neoclas-sical tenet of ...

The purpose of the present review is to summarize, and attempt to reconcile, the empirical research on the actual impact teachers unions have on American education. To give structure to that effort, this article analyses the unions’ effectiveness in pursuing five of their key objectives: (1) raising their members’ wages, (2) growing their membership, (3) increasing the share of the public school labor force that they represent, (4) precluding pay based on performance or aptitude, and (5) minimizing competition from nonunion shops.

The last three decades have witnessed an unprecedented expansion of market-based reforms and the profusion of economic freedom in the international system. This shift in economic policy has sparked a debate about whether free markets are superior to state controls. Numerous studies have compared the neoliberal and statist policies on issues of production capacity, economic growth, commercial volumes, and egalitarianism. An overlooked research agenda, however, is the relationship between levels of economic freedom and violence within countries. Proponents of the statist approach might note that a strong government can bend the market to its will, directing activity toward policies necessary to achieve greater levels of gross domestic product and growth. By extracting more resources for the economy, a powerful state can redistribute benefits to keep the populace happy. Higher taxes can also pay for an army and police force that intimidate people. Such governments range from command ec...

Why we need to stop wasting public funds on education Despite being immensely popular--and immensely lucrative?education is grossly overrated. In this explosive book, Bryan Caplan argues that the primary function of education is not to enhance students' skill but to certify their intelligence, work ethic, and conformity?in other words, to signal the qualities of a good employee. Learn why students hunt for easy As and casually forget most of what they learn after the final exam, why decades of growing access to education have not resulted in better jobs for the average worker but instead in runaway credential inflation, how employers reward workers for costly schooling they rarely if ever use, and why cutting education spending is the best remedy. Caplan draws on the latest social science to show how the labor market values grades over knowledge, and why the more education your rivals have, the more you need to impress employers. He explains why graduation is our society's top conformity signal, and why even the most useless degrees can certify employability. He advocates two major policy responses. The first is educational austerity. Government needs to sharply cut education funding to curb this wasteful rat race. The second is more vocational education, because practical skills are more socially valuable than teaching students how to outshine their peers. Romantic notions about education being "good for the soul" must yield to careful research and common sense?The Case against Education points the way.

China has maintained a nearly fixed exchange rate of 8.26 renminbi (RMB) to the U.S. dollar since 1994, in spite of the near total collapse of practically every other fixed exchange rate regime over the last decade. Hong Kong, a special administrative region of China, happens to have the world's other so-far durable fixed exchange rate regime. That is a coincidence, geographically speaking. In Hong Kong's case the stability of its exchange rate derives from the currency board apparatus that was installed before the 1997 reversion to China. The Hong Kong currency board model may be appropriate for smaller developing economies. Large economies are better candidates for floating exchange rates. If China is going to fulfill the objective of competing on the level of Japan, Europe, or the United States, it would make sense to move to an RMB floating regime (see, e.g., Dorn 2003). This advice coincides with recent pronouncements from the International Monetary Fund, encouraging Ch...