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Why does the regulation of risks to human health and safety vary so dramatically from one policy domain to another? Why are some risks regulated aggressively and others responded to only modestly? Is there any logic to the techniques we use in risk regulation? This book addresses these important questions by systematically examining variety amongst risk regulation regimes across policy domains, analysing the significant driving forces shaping those regimes, and identifying the causes of regulatory failure and success. In order to do so, the book develops a systems‐based concept of a ‘risk regulation regime’, which enables comparative description and analysis of the rules, institutional arrangements, and cultures that are bound up with the handling of risk within and between regimes. Using that framework, the book analyses how regimes and their constituent components are differentially shaped by three major driving forces—namely, the pressures exerted by market failure, by public opinion, and by organized interests inside and outside the state apparatus—and blame‐avoidance responses of regimes in the face of pressures for greater openness. The book applies the method to analyse a range of risk regulation regimes that cross the divide between ‘natural’ and ‘socially created’, state‐created and market‐created, ‘voluntary’ and ‘involuntary’, high‐tech and low‐tech, individually, and corporately produced risks. Those regimes include the release of paedophiles into the community, air pollution, local road safety, radon, pesticides, and dangerous dogs. The analysis reveals both variations and paradoxes that can neither be identified by single case studies, nor be easily explained by macro‐oriented approaches to understanding risk regulation. The Government of Risk shows how such an approach is of high policy relevance as well as of considerable theoretical importance.

It has traditionally been thought that the substitution of co-referential terms succeeds in all but a few special linguistic contexts, such as belief reports. Philosophers have devoted considerable energy to attempting to understand these special contexts. This book discusses apparent cases of substitution failure in simple sentences: those that do not involve any such special contexts. It shows that existing theories — whether semantic or pragmatic — cannot accommodate these cases, and that certain central assumptions regarding the role of intuitions must be abandoned in order to deal with them. The book offers a new explanation of anti-substitution intuitions that builds on empirical data from psychology, and explores the methodological implications of this form of explanation.

While standard accounts of the theoretical debates in 1930s economic thought invariably pit John Maynard Keynes against Friedrich von Hayek, this reflexive dichotomy is in many respects exceedingly superficial. It is the argument of this book that both Keynes and Hayek developed their respective theories of the business cycle within the tradition of Swedish economist Knut Wicksell, and that this shared genealogy manifested itself in significant theoretical affinities between the two apparent antagonists. The salient features of Wicksell’s work, namely, the importance of money, the role of uncertainty, coordination failures, and the element of time in capital accumulation, all motivate the Keynesian and Hayekian theories of economic fluctuations, and contributed, The author argues to a fundamental convergence between the two economists during the course of the 1930s. Moreover, this shared, “Wicksellian” vision of the economic problem points to a very different research agenda from that of the Walrasian-style, general equilibrium analysis that has dominated postwar macroeconomics. The book aims not only to deconstruct some of the historical misconceptions of the Keynes versus Hayek debate but also to suggest how the insights thus uncovered can inform and instruct modern theory. While much of the analysis is quite technical, it does not assume previous knowledge of 1930s economic theory and thus should be accessible to economists, political scientists, and historians with general economics training, as well as to graduate students in these fields.

Introduces methodological tools for dynamic analysis of macroeconomic phenomena: consumption and investment choices, employment, and unemployment outcomes, and economic growth. Discrete‐time dynamic optimization under uncertainty is introduced in Ch. 1 and applied to intertemporal consumption theory, with particular attention to empirical implementation. Chapter 2 focuses on continuous‐time optimization techniques and discusses the relevant insights in the context of partial equilibrium investment models. Chapter 3 applies previous chapters’ tools to dynamic labour demand, deriving the labour market equilibrium when both firms and workers face dynamic adjustment problems. Chapter 4 studies continuous‐time equilibrium dynamics of representative‐agent economies featuring both consumption and investment choices, with applications to long‐run growth issues. The role of externalities in more recent models of endogenous growth is carefully discussed. Chapter 5 studies the determination of aggregate equilibria in markets with decentralized trading, discussing the possibility of coordination failures and multiple equilibria. A search model of the labour market, focussed on the flows into and out of unemployment, is then analyzed and the dynamics of frictional unemployment are discussed. Many exercises can be found both within and at the ends of chapters, with extended solutions.

The obesity epidemic and the growing debate about what, if any, public health policy should be adopted is the subject of endless debates within the media and in governments around the world. Whilst much has been written on the subject, this book takes a unique approach by looking at the obesity epidemic from an economic perspective. Written in a language accessible to non-specialists, the authors provide a timely discussion of evolving nutrition policies in both the developing and developed world, discuss the factors influencing supply and demand of food supply, and review the evidence for various factors which may explain recent trends in diets, weight, and health. The traditional economic model assumes people choose to be overweight as part of a utility maximisation process that involves choices about what to eat and drink, how much time to spend on leisure, food preparation, and exercise, and choices about appearance and health. Market and behavioural failures, however, such as time available to a person, education, costs imposed on the health system and economic productivity provide the economic rationale for government intervention. The authors explore various policy measures designed to deal with the epidemic and examine their effectiveness within a cost-benefit analysis framework. While providing a sound economic basis for analysing policy decisions, the book also aims to show the underlying limits of the economic framework in quantifying changes in public well-being.

Is it ever possible for people to act freely and intentionally against their better judgement? Is it ever possible to act in opposition to one's strongest desire? If either of these questions are answered in the negative, the common-sense distinctions between recklessness, weakness of will and compulsion collapse. This would threaten our ordinary notion of self-control and undermine our practice of holding each other responsible for moral failure. So a clear and plausible account of how weakness of will and self-control are possible is of great practical significance. Taking the problem of weakness of will as her starting point, Jeanette Kennett builds an admirably comprehensive and integrated account of moral agency which gives a central place to the capacity for self-control. Her account of the exercise and limits of self-control vindicates the common-sense distinction between weakness of will and compulsion and so underwrites our ordinary allocations of moral responsibility. She addresses with clarity and insight a range of important topics in moral psychology, such as the nature of valuing and desiring, conceptions of virtue, moral conflict, and the varieties of recklessness (here characterised as culpable bad judgement) — and does so in terms which make their relations to each other and to the challenges of real life obvious. Agency and Responsibility concludes by testing the accounts developed of self-control, moral failure, and moral responsibility against the hard cases provided by acts of extreme evil.

Dyspnoea (breathlessness) is an uncomfortable awareness of breathing that occurs in approximately 30–75% of terminal cancer patients. It is one of the most distressing symptoms for both patients and family members and can seriously impact on quality of life. Typically, dyspnoea is associated with congestive heart failure, end-stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or lung cancer. This book provides palliative care doctors and specialist nurses with practical guidelines to help manage and treat patients with breathlessness. It includes the science behind the symptom in an attempt to explain the pathology and physiology of this complex condition. The book has been organized to address generalized aspects of breathlessness in advanced illness and more specific aetiologies and managements relevant to particular underlying diseases. It summarizes the epidemiology and the pathophysiology of breathlessness, measurement, research approaches, rehabilitation and exercise, clinical approaches that can be taken at the bedside, pharmacological and non-pharmacological approaches, and surgical interventions. The care of patients with dyspnoea requires input from a variety of disciplines such as palliative care, physiotherapy, respiratory medicine, and nursing, and this is reflected in the multidisciplinary list of contributors.