Oxford University Press's Blog, page 838

Something to like about bitcoin

By Richard S. Grossman

Within months of being introduced in 2009, enthusiasts were hailing bitcoin, the digital currency and peer-to-peer payment system, as the successor to the dollar, euro, and yen as the world’s most important currency.

The collapse of the Mt. Gox bitcoin exchange last month has dulled some of the enthusiasm for the online currency. According to bitcoincharts.com, the price of bitcoin, which had peaked at over $1100 in December, tumbled to about half of that in the wake of the Mt. Gox failure, leading a number of commentators to suggest that bitcoin is finished.

Others remain bullish on the currency, arguing that the collapse will lead to greater scrutiny of the system and the reemergence of a stronger, more secure bitcoin. Although the price of bitcoin has declined since the Mt. Gox collapse and volatility remains high, rallies are not unheard of. On 3 March 2014, for example, bitcoin began the day trading around $580 and peaked at over $700 before falling back into the upper $600s (data from bitcoincharts.com).

I have argued elsewhere that if bitcoin were to replace the leading world currencies, the results would be catastrophic. The most important objection is that—when it works according to plan—bitcoin mimics the gold standard. The total number of bitcoins that can be created (“mined” in bitcoin terminology, just to maintain the image of gold) is fixed and cannot be altered. Adopting a bitcoin standard would make it virtually impossible for central bankers to undertake aggressive monetary measures—as the Fed and European Central Bank have done—to bolster a flagging economy and a financial system on the point of collapse.

Another public policy downside of bitcoin is that because it is peer-to-peer, without a centralized monitoring authority, it allows funds to be transferred away from the prying eyes of government. This famously came to light last fall when the on-line drug bazaar Silk Road—which conducted much of its business in bitcoin–was shut down by the FBI and its proprietor arrested on drug and computer charges. Needless to say, the attractiveness of a payments system like bitcoin to criminals and terrorists should dampen the fervor of even the most enthusiastic bitcoin devotee.

Is there anything to like about bitcoin?

Yes. Bitcoin—or, more precisely, a system with some of bitcoin’s attributes—would give a boost to commerce.

Moving money with bitcoin is cheaper than using PayPal, credit cards, or bank transfers, all of which charge one or both parties fees. The savings on international transactions are even greater, since these transactions, when carried out with traditional currencies, typically involve both higher fees for moving the money as well as additional charges for converting form one currency to another. Denominating the transaction in bitcoin eliminates the currency conversion fee altogether.

Eliminating fees associated with commercial transactions is the most compelling argument in favor of bitcoin, as anyone who has ever used a credit card overseas, tried to transfer money, or used an out-of-network ATM will attest. The disadvantages of bitcoin far outweigh its benefits. Still, its ability to facilitate cheaper trade is appealing. The sooner someone figures out how to adopt that aspect of bitcoin for safer, more adaptable traditional currencies, the better for all of us.

Richard S. Grossman is Professor of Economics at Wesleyan University and a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. He is the author of WRONG: Nine Economic Policy Disasters and What We Can Learn from Them and Unsettled Account: The Evolution of Banking in the Industrialized World since 1800. His homepage is RichardSGrossman.com, he blogs at UnsettledAccount.com, and you can follow him on Twitter at @RSGrossman. You can also read his previous OUPblog posts.

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Image credit: Bitcoin banknote by CASASCIUS. Creative Commons License via Wikimedia Commons.

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Look beneath the vote

By Matthew Flinders

Hands up if you’ve heard of National Voter Registration Day? And in the somewhat unlikely event that you have, did you realise that it took place last month?

If this momentous milestone passed you by, you’re not alone. Whatever 5 February means to the people of the United Kingdom, it’s safe to assume that electoral participation doesn’t figure prominently. This is not a surprise; it reflects a deep-seated public disengagement from politics, as indicated by the fact that only two thirds of eligible voters in the 2010 general election actually voted. Throughout the twentieth century, general election turnouts almost always exceeded 70%, but that’s a level of participation that has not been seen since 1997. Incidentally, the highest turnout since 1900 was 86.8% in January 1910, though only rate-paying men over the age of 21 could vote.

Low voter turnout is clearly a problem, but arguably a much greater worry is the growing inequality of that turnout. As a recent report from the Institute for Public Policy Research makes clear, the United Kingdom is very much a ‘divided democracy’, with electoral participation among the young and the poor declining dramatically. In the 1987 general election, for example, the turnout rate for the poorest income group was 4% lower than for the wealthiest. By 2010 the gap had grown to a staggering 23 points. A similar pattern is observable in relation to age groups. In 1970 there was an 18-point gap in turnout rates between 18–24-year-olds and those aged over 65; by 2005 this gap had more than doubled to over 40 points, before narrowing slightly to 32 points in 2010. ”If we focus on participation within these age-groups,” the IPPR report concludes “we can see that at the 2010 general election the turnout rate for a typical 70-year-old was 36 percentage points higher than that of a typical 20-year-old.”

If this isn’t bad enough there is little evidence that young people will simply start voting as they get older. On the contrary, the IPPR’s research suggests that “younger people today are less likely than previous generations to develop the habit of voting as they move into middle age.” These trends mean that politicians tend to address themselves to the older and richer sections of society – the people, in other words, that are most likely to vote. This, in turn, reinforces the views of the young and the poor that politicians don’t care about them. And that, naturally, leads to even greater political estrangement.

So what’s the solution? How do we re-establish a connection between ordinary people and politicians? In particular, how do we persuade the young and the poor that the political system really does have something to offer them?

The answers lie not in quick fixes or technological solutions – such as the introduction of compulsory voting, changing the ballot paper or promoting ‘digital democracy’ – but in adopting a fundamentally deeper, richer and more creative approach to democratic engagement. People will only vote – be they young or old, rich or poor – when they understand why democratic politics matters and what it can deliver. Therefore, to increase electoral participation we must focus on promoting the public understanding of politics from all perspectives (conservative, traditional, radical, etc.) in a way that demonstrates that individual responses to collective social challenges are rarely likely to be effective. It’s this deeper understanding, this notion of political literacy promoted by Sir Bernard Crick and defined as ‘a compound of knowledge, skills and attitudes’ that citizens can use to navigate the complex social and political choices that face us all. Political literacy can be seen as a basic social requirement that empowers people to become politically aware, effective, and engaged while also being respectful of differences of opinion or belief.

In this regard, the message from survey after survey is a dismal one. Large sections of the British public appear to know very little about the political system. Even relatively basic questions such as “What do MPs do?” or “What’s the difference between Parliament and the Executive?” tend to elicit a mixture of mild embarrassment and complete bafflement.

Given that levels of political literacy are so low, it’s little surprise that many people choose not to vote. They’re unaware of the very real benefits the political system delivers for them (clean water, social protection, healthcare, education, etc.) and they no longer believe that they can become the engine of real social change. And yet they can. Worse, by opting out of elections they risk diminishing their representation as politicians focus their messages on the groups that do vote. Young people are constantly reminded that to be “uneducated” – let alone innumerate or illiterate – is to risk deprivation and vulnerability, but in many ways to be politically illiterate brings with it exactly the same risks. Moreover, the impact of declining political literacy isn’t only felt at the individual level. With so many people in society alienated from politics, democracy itself is weakened

Such arguments are by no means abstract concerns. On 7 May 2015, a General Election will be held on the basis of individual voter registration rather than the previous system of household voter registration. Research suggests that although this transition is likely to increase electoral security it may also result in a considerable decline in levels of electoral participation amongst – yes, you’ve’ guessed it – the young and the poor.  This is not a reason to turn back from individual registration but it is a reason to step-back and acknowledge that if we’re really serious about healing a divided democracy, then we need to focus on promoting engaged citizenship through different channels and processes. We need to take some risks and stir things up, but most of all we need a long-term plan for fostering political literacy.

Matthew Flinders is Founding Director of the Sir Bernard Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics at the University of Sheffield and also Visiting Distinguished Professor in Governance and Public Policy at Mu rdoch University, Western Australia. He is the author of Defending Politics (2012). 

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Why America must organize innovation

“Organized” and “innovation” are words rarely heard together. But an organized approach to innovation is precisely what America needs today, argue Steve Currall, Ed Frauenheim, Sara Jansen Perry, and Emily Hunter. We sat down with the authors of Organized Innovation: A Blueprint for Renewing America’s Prosperity to discuss why American ought to organize its innovation efforts.

Why does America need a more organized innovation system today?

An “innovation gap” has emerged in recent decades — where US universities focus on basic research, and industry concentrates on incremental product development. At the same time, the stakes have risen around technology invention and commercialization. Innovation has become more central to the economic health of nations, but the rate of US innovation is slowing while that if other nations is accelerating. Since 2008, the number of foreign-origin patents that the US Patent and Trademark Office has granted annually has surpassed the number of domestic-origin patents. Between 1999 and 2009, the US share of global research and development spending dropped, while the share of Asia as a whole rose and exceeded the US share in 2009.

What’s behind this innovation gap?

In a nutshell, history and a set of myths held by many in the United States. The gap dates to the 1970s and 1980s, as big US companies retreated from basic research and focused on incremental product development. The shift had to do with a greater focus on short-term financial results, as well as increased competitive pressures. Research fell to the universities, but academic research often remains within particular disciplines, conducted in a vacuum that minimizes societal needs. Too often academic research does not make the leap beyond the lab to the real world. For years, observers have noticed the widening gap, but it has not been addressed. We think that has much to do with three myths—that innovation is about lone geniuses, the free market, and serendipity. These myths blind us from seeing that we tolerate an unorganized, less-than-optimal system of innovation.

What do you propose as a solution?

We call it Organized Innovation. It is a blueprint for better coordinating the key players in the US innovation ecosystem: universities, businesses, and government. The solution taps the power of both the private and public sectors to generate groundbreaking innovations—the kinds of new technologies that create good jobs and improve life for everyone.

The solution has three main pillars:

Channeled Curiosity: steering researchers’ fundamental inquiries toward real-world problems.
Boundary-Breaking Collaboration: tearing down walls between academic disciplines, and between universities and the private sector to better generate novel, high-impact technologies.
Orchestrated Commercialization: coordinating the various players involved in technology commercialization—including scholars, university administrators, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and corporations—to translate research insights into real-world benefits.

The Organized Innovation framework already has proven effective in closing the innovation gap. It is inspired by our nearly decade-long study of a highly successful but little-known federal initiative, the National Science Foundation’s Engineering Research Centers. These university-based centers require researchers to link basic science to social and market demand, require interdisciplinary and industry-academic collaboration and encourage the creation of proofs-of-concept to demonstrate that a lab-based technology has commercial potential. From 1985 to 2009, about $1 billion in federal funding was invested in the centers. They have returned more than 10 times that amount in a wide variety of technology innovations.

What is your favorite example about new technology generated from the Engineering Research Center program?

Our favorite case is about Mark Humayun and his artificial retina. Humayun is a fascinating individual, and his team developed a device that captures video from a camera embedded in eyeglasses and wirelessly relays digital signals to an implant placed directly on the retina. The artificial retina, called Argus II, is approved for use in the European Union and won US FDA approval in early 2013. Humayun’s device is changing lives — restoring useful vision to people blinded by retinal diseases.

You propose that the US government changes its approach to funding research and development. What is your message to policy makers?

We propose that federal and state funding agencies devote funds to research programs that embody Organized Innovation principles, which may translate into more funding for research with practical significance or innovation outcomes. The key advantages of our model are that we can maximize the public’s return on research and development investments. Both political parties can support this approach; it is fundamentally bipartisan.

Organized Innovation goes against the grain of widespread doubts about the ability of universities, business, and government to work together to solve problems, especially amid growing public deficits. But we’re convinced Americans will have the courage to see the value of such investments in our future.

Steve Currall, Ed Frauenheim, Sara Jansen Perry, and Emily Hunter are the authors of Organized Innovation: A Blueprint for Renewing America’s Prosperity. Steven C. Currall is Dean and Professor of Management in the Graduate School of Management at the University of California, Davis. Ed Frauenheim is an author, speaker, and associate editorial director of Workforce magazine, where he writes about the intersection of people management, technology and business strategy. Sara Jansen Perry, Assistant Professor of Management in the College of Business at the University of Houston-Downtown, earned her Ph.D. in Industrial-Organizational Psychology at the University of Houston. Emily M. Hunter is Assistant Professor of Management and Entrepreneurship in the Hankamer School of Business at Baylor University after earning her Ph.D. in Industrial-Organizational Psychology at the University of Houston.

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“You’ll be mine forever”: A reading of Ovid’s Amores

Amores was Ovid’s first complete work of poetry, and is one of his most famous. The poems in Amores document the shifting passions and emotions of a narrator who shares Ovid’s name, and who is in love with a woman he calls Corinna. She is of a higher class and therefore unattainable, but the poems show the progression from infatuation to love to affair to loss. In these excerpts, we see two sides of the affair — a declaration of love, and a hot afternoon spent with Corinna. Our poet here is Jane Alison, author of Change Me: Stories of Sexual Transformation from Ovid, a new translation of Ovid’s love poetry.

Amores 1.3

It’s only fair: the girl who snared me should love me, too,


or keep me in love forever.


Oh, I want too much: if she’ll just endure my love,


Venus will have granted my prayers.


Please take me. I’d be your slave year after long year.


Please take me. I know how to love true.


I might not be graced with a grand family name,


only knight-blood runs in my veins,


my acres might not need ploughs ad infinitum,


my parents count pennies, are tight—


but I’ve got Apollo, the Muses, and Bacchus,


and Amor, who sent me your way,


plus true fidelity, unimpeachable habits,


barest candor, blushingest shame.


I don’t chase lots of girls—I’m no bounder in love.


Trust me: you’ll be mine forever.


I want to live with you each year the Fates spin me


and die with you there to mourn.


Give me yourself—a subject perfect for poems—


they’ll spring up, adorning their source.


Poems made Io (horrified heifer-girl) famous,


plus that girl led on by a “swan”


and the one who set sail on a make-believe bull,


his lilting horn tight in her fist.


We too will be famous, sung all over the world:


my name bound forever to yours.

Amores 1.5

Scorching hot, and the day had drifted past noon;


I spread out on my bed to rest.


Some slats of the windows were open, some shut,


the light as if in a forest


or like the sinking sun’s cool glow at dusk


or when night wanes, but dawn’s not come.


It was the sort of light that nervous girls love,


their shyness hoping for shadows.


And oh—in slips Corinna, her thin dress unsashed,


hair rivering down her pale neck,


just as lovely Sameramis would steal into a bedroom,


they say, or Lais, so loved by men.


I pulled at her dress, so scant its loss barely showed,


but still she struggled to keep it.


Though she struggled a bit, she did not want to win:


undone by herself, she gave in.


When she stood before me, her dress on the floor,


her body did not have a flaw.


Such shoulders I saw and touched—oh, such arms.


The form of her breast firm in my palm,


and below that firm fullness a belly so smooth—


her long shapely sides, her young thighs!


Why list one by one? I saw nothing not splendid


and clasped her close to me, bare.


Who can’t guess the rest? And then we lay languid.


Oh, for more middays just so.

Jane Alison is author of Change Me: Stories of Sexual Transformation from Ovid. Her previous works on Ovid include her first novel, The Love-Artist (2001) and a song-cycle entitled XENIA (with composer Thomas Sleeper, 2010). Her other books include a memoir, The Sisters Antipodes (2009), and two novels, Natives and Exotics (2005) and The Marriage of the Sea (2003). She is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia.

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A crisis of European democracy?

By Sara B Hobolt and James Tilley

During November 2012 hundreds of thousands of people across Europe took to the streets. The protesters were, by and large, complaining about government policies that increased taxes and lowered government spending. This initially sounds like a familiar story of popular protests against government austerity programmes, but there is a twist to the tale. Many of the people protesting were not aiming their ire at the national governments making the cuts in spending, but rather at the European Union. In Portugal, people carried effigies of their prime minister on strings and claimed he was a ‘puppet of the EU’; in Greece people burned the EU flag and shouted ‘EU out’; and in Italy people threw stones at the European Parliament offices. It was, at least for some people on the streets, not the incumbent national politicians in Lisbon, Athens, and Rome who were to blame for the problem of the day, but rather politicians and bureaucrats thousands of miles away in Brussels.

The economic crisis in Europe has illustrated that citizens are increasingly blaming not just their national governments, but also ‘Europe’ for their woes. This raises the question of whether citizens can hold European politicians to account for the outcomes for which they are thought to be responsible. The notion of democratic accountability relies on the critical assumption that voters are able to assign responsibility for policy decisions and outcomes, and sanction the government in elections if it is responsible for outcomes not seen to be ‘in their best interest’. This process, however, is clearly complicated in the multilevel system of the European Union where responsibility is not only dispersed across multiple levels of government, but there are also multiple mechanisms for sanctioning governments.

Democratic accountability in multilevel systems can be viewed as a two-step process, where specific requirements need to be met at each step to allow voters to hold governments to account. The first step is one where voters decide which level of government, if any, is responsible for specific policy outcomes and decisions. This depends on the clarity of institutional divisions of powers across levels of government, and the information available about the responsibilities of these divisions. The second step is one where voters should be able to sanction the government in an election on the basis of performance. This depends on government clarity: that is the ability of voters to identify a cohesive political actor that they can sanction accordingly.

Both of these steps are important. Assignment of responsibility to a particular level of government is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition to be able to punish an incumbent at the polls. To do so, voters also need to know which party or individual to vote for or against. Yet, the EU lacks a clear and identifiable government. Executive power is shared between the European Council and the European Commission, and legislative power is shared between the Council of the EU and the European Parliament. The primary mechanism through which citizens can hold EU institutions to account is via elections to the European Parliament. Unlike in national parliamentary systems, the majority in the European Parliament does not ‘elect’ the EU executive, however. Despite the formal powers of the European Parliament over the approval and dismissal of the European Commission there is only a tenuous link between the political majority in the Parliament and the policies of the Commission, not least since there is no clear government-opposition division in the Parliament. Despite current attempts to present rival candidates for the post of Commission president prior to the European Parliament elections in May, there is still no competition between candidates with competing policy agendas and different records at the EU level. Without this kind of politicised contest it is simply not possible for voters to identify which parties are responsible for the current policy outcomes and which parties offer an alternative.

As a consequence, the classic model of electoral accountability cannot be applied to European Parliament elections. Even if citizens think the EU is responsible for poor policy performance in an area, they find it difficult to identify which parties are ‘governing’ and punish, or reward, them at the ballot box. This has broader implications for trust and legitimacy. When people hold the EU responsible for poor performance, but cannot hold it accountable for that performance, they become less trusting of the EU institutions as a whole. Thus the danger for the EU is that every time the system fails to deliver — such as during the Eurozone crisis — the result is declining levels of trust and a crisis of confidence in the regime as a whole, because voters lack the opportunity to punish an incumbent and elect an alternative. In other words, the lack of mechanisms to hold EU policymakers to account may lead to a more fundamental legitimacy crisis in the European Union.

Sara Hobolt and James Tilley are co-authors of Blaming Europe? Responsibility without accountability in the European Union. Sara Hobolt is the Sutherland Chair in European Institutions at the European Institute of the London School of Economics and Political Science. James Tilley is a university lecturer at the Department of Politics and International m Relations at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Jesus College, Oxford.

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A day with Carol Channing in Disneyland

By Eddie Shapiro

When I began work on my book, I knew I would be fortunate enough to experience a few moments of “Pinch me. This can’t really be happening.” There were, as it turned out, so many that I’d be black and blue if there was actual pinching going on. But of all of those moments, I think the highlight would have to be spending a day at Disneyland with Carol Channing and her late husband, Harry Kullijian, who were then 90 and 91 respectively.

I had interviewed Carol the day before in front of an adoring audience at the annual Gay Days at Disneyland. But it had been decades since Carol had been in the park and the last time she was, her tour guide was, um, Walt Disney. She had a picture to prove it. Carol, Walt, and Maurice Chevalier on Main Street, USA! I couldn’t exactly beat that, but I did what I could. I mapped out the day with a full compliment of attractions starting gently enough with “Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln,“ an indoor show at which a robotic Abe recites the Gettysburg address. Carol was moved to tears. “It’s Walt!” she exclaimed. “This whole attraction is his spirit. Exactly who he was.” We emerged just in time to hear the Disneyland Marching Band emphatically playing “When the Saints Go Marching In.” We clapped along before we hopped on “The Disneyland Railroad,” a steam train that circles the park. Carol grabbed my hand as we approached and began singing at full voice, “Put on your Sunday clothes when you feel down and out…” the song from Hello, Dolly! that culminates with the full company boarding a similar train. We sang together as we chugged along. I died.

Mickey Mouse bows to Carol Channing. Photo courtesy of Eddie Shapiro.

We rode the Peter Pan ride and the tea cups, we met Mickey Mouse (who literally got on his knees and bowed down to Carol), and we had our own boat on “It’s a Small World.” It was all just as I had planned it until… the unexpected. As we were walking through Fantasyland, Harry kept staring in the direction of the carousel. I hadn’t planned on an attraction as simple as the carousel because, well, it’s a carousel. But I couldn’t help but notice Harry’s interest. “Harry,” I asked, “did you want to ride the carousel?” “I’m lookin’ at it,” came the reply. “Well Harry,” I said, “we’re here! If you want to ride it, let’s ride it.”  We boarded and I went off in search of a nice bench for Carol and Harry. Carol seated herself but Harry was determined to mount a horse. At 91, however, he needed a hand or two, so I put my shoulder under his lower back and hoisted him up there. I then ran around to the other side and manually swung his leg astride the horse.

Harry Kullijian, Carol Channing’s husband, on the carousel. Photo courtesy of Eddie Shapiro.

He was beaming, positively giddy. And in that moment, I realized that I was getting a major life lesson here. Carol and Harry were frail (he, in fact, passed less than three months later); one misstep could have been hugely consequential. A jostle from someone in the crowd could have been dire. But here they were, not just tasting everything life had to offer, but gobbling it up. If there was life to live, they were going to live it. And I thought to myself, “How does one become lucky enough to age into these people? Is it genetic? Is it a choice? What can I do to insure that when my golden years are upon me, I make them as golden as I can? Because these people have figured it out. They are who I aspire to be.”

When the sun was finally setting, we headed back to the hotel. I left them sitting in the lobby next to the grand piano while I went up to the room to retrieve their luggage. I returned just as the pianist was arriving for his set. He spied Carol and in no time he was gently tinkling the notes of “Hello, Dolly!” Before I knew what was happening, Carol was on her feet, one hand on the piano, the other aloft, belting out “Hello, Dolly!” for anyone who happened to be passing through the lobby of the Grand Californian Hotel at 4:30 in the afternoon. It was something to behold and a moment I will never, ever forget.

For months afterward, Harry would call me, just to say hello. “You don’t know the gift you gave us that day,” he would always end with. “Harry,” I’d always reply, “you don’t know the gift you gave me.”

Author Eddie Shapiro, Carol Channing, and her husband Harry Kullijian on the tea cup ride at Disneyland. Photo courtesy of Eddie Shapiro.

Eddie Shapiro is the author of Nothing Like a Dame: Conversations with the Great Women of Musical Theater. His writing has appeared in publications such as Out Magazine, Instinct, and Backstage West. He is also a producer of Gay Days Disneyland and the author of Queens in the Kingdom: The Ultimate Gay and Lesbian Guide to the Disney Theme Parks. 

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The Gaied Decision: a rare victory for tax sanity in New York

By Edward Zelinsky

In a unanimous decision, New York’s Court of Appeals, the Empire State’s highest court, recently held that John Gaied was not a New York resident for income tax purposes because he had no New York home.

Mr. Gaied was domiciled in New Jersey and had a business on Staten Island to which he commuted daily. He purchased a multi-family apartment building near his business in New York, both as an investment and to house his parents who lived in the building’s first floor apartment.

New York’s tax commissioner claimed that this Staten Island building made Mr. Gaied a New York resident for tax purposes. The New York Tax Appeals Tribunal and the New York Appellate Division affirmed the commissioner’s determination that this building constituted Mr. Gaied’s “permanent place of abode” in New York – even though Mr. Gaied personally did not lived there.

The good news is that Mr. Gaied ultimately prevailed. The bad news is that he had to fight his way to New York’s highest court to prevail. As that court held, “in order for a taxpayer to have maintained a permanent place of abode in New York, the taxpayer must, himself, have a residential interest in the property.” Since it was Mr. Gaied’s parents who lived in the first floor apartment, not Mr. Gaied himself, he was not a New York resident for tax purposes.

Mr. Gaied’s lawyer, Timothy P. Noonan of Hodgson Russ, LLP, is entitled to be proud of this victory for tax sanity in New York. The problem is that such sanity is all too rare. Mr. Gaied had to go to New York’s highest court to establish the common sense proposition that a “place of abode” is a location at which the taxpayer actually lives.

Unfortunately, the kind of irrationality manifested by New York’s tax commissioner in Gaied is endemic to New York’s tax system. Consider, for example, New York’s insistence that the modest beach house owned and used by Mr. John J. Barker for a handful of vacation days each year transforms Mr. Barker into a New York resident, even though his permanent home is in Connecticut. Or consider New York’s “convenience of the employer” doctrine under which New York taxes the income earned by nonresident telecommuters on the days such telecommuters work at their out-of-state homes and don’t set foot in the Empire State. There is much that is irrational and self-destructive in New York tax policy.

Governor Cuomo has eloquently proclaimed that New York can no longer be “the tax capital” of the United States. The Governor is right. Hopefully, Gaied will signal to New York’s policymakers the need to reform New York’s self-destructive approach to personal income taxation. Repairing New York’s definition of residence and abolishing the “convenience of the employer” doctrine would be good places to start.

Edward A. Zelinsky is the Morris and Annie Trachman Professor of Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University. He is the author of The Origins of the Ownership Society: How The Defined Contribution Paradigm Changed America. His monthly column appears on the OUPblog.

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William Godwin’s birthday

By Mark Philp

Do people at the end of the eighteenth century celebrate their birthdays? More precisely, what did William Godwin (1756-1836) — philosopher, novelist, husband of feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97) and father of Mary Shelly (1797-1851) — do on his birthday, which falls on 3 March?

Godwin was a man of some exactitude. As a major contributor to the development of utilitarianism, the weighing of competing concerns and interests and the rigorous exercise of private judgment on the basis of rational reflection is a central theme in his philosophy. But his concern with detail is also reflected in the diary that he kept for the last 48 years of his long life. He used the diary to note things very precisely, if often cryptically — such as the entry in 1825: ‘void a large worm’; or in his twice daily recording of the interior temperature of the house for the last ten years of his life.

But he did not note birthdays. He mentions the birthday of Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) in 1788 because there is a party for Gibbon hosted by the bookseller Thomas Cadell. In 1825 he mentions that of Mary Lamb, sister of the essayist Charles Lamb, when she was 61, possibly also because there was some event. The only other appearance of the phrase in the Diary is in relation to a play which he identifies as Birth Day (probably by the German dramatist Kotzebue), which he sees (in whole or part) on five occasions. Moreover, he makes nothing of his own birthday — 3 March — whether it be his 40th, 50th, 60th, or 80th. The diary entries for his birthdays are wholly undifferentiated from other days. Moreover, there is no evidence that he celebrated Mary Wollstonecraft’s birthday, nor those of any of his children.

Page from William Godwin’s journal recording Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin’s (Mary Shelley’s) birth on 30 August 1797

In contrast, he noted over three hundred deaths in the diary — including ‘Execution of Louis’ on 21 January 1793, Edmund Burke on 8 July 1797, the assassination of the Prime Minister Spencer Percival on 11 May 1812, the death (also by assassination) of the German dramatist Kotzebue on 23 March 1819, but also a host of more quotidian occasions involving friends and acquaintances. Interestingly, these dates are all exact – other than Burke, who we now believe to have died the following day! But the exactitude of the others is striking because it means that Godwin was going back to his diary to fill in details as he became aware of them – the news of Louis’ execution took some 36 hours to reach Britain, and Kotzebue’s death would have travelled more slowly. This suggests that he took at least one of life’s major events very seriously, and noted the occasion with retrospective precision.

Is Godwin unusual? That he notes very occasional birthdays of others suggests both that he was, and, because he notes so few, that he was not. Or he was not unusual in the circles in which he moved — the literary and cultural circles of London in the last decades of the eighteenth and first thirty years of the nineteenth century. Moreover, he came from a family of dissenting ministers and was himself a minister in the years following his education, before turning in the 1780s to history and philosophy and an increasing agnosticism, punctuated by periods of atheism. In that tradition — nurtured on such texts as James Janeway’s, A Token for Children being an exact account of the conversion, holy and exemplary lives and joyful deaths of several young children (1671) — the manner of one’s life and death has infinitely more significance than the mere fact of birth.

This contrast is also evident in Godwin main philosophical work – Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) — is clear that there is little sacred in mere life. It is what a person does with his or her life — above all what they do for others and for the general good of the community that counts in our evaluation of them. While Godwin speculated that the lot of humanity would involve increasing subordination of the physical to the intellectual, with a concomitant shift to increasing longevity and eventual immortality, it is also clear that he took the measure of his fellow men and women in terms of how they lived their lives — hence his almost obsessive recording of the deaths of his contemporaries, both famous and obscure. The ending of life marks the point for its final reckoning. In Godwin’s philosophy that evaluation is to be made in terms of the person’s contribution to the good of one’s fellow human beings — above all, one’s contribution to their intellectual development and the expansion of the powers of mind and human knowledge. And, on that account, maybe we should commemorate Godwin’s death day instead — 7 April 1836.

Mark Philp is Professor of History and Politics at the University of Warwick. He has published widely on eighteenth century political thought and social movements and on contemporary political theory, including Reforming Ideas in Britain (2013), Thomas Paine (2007), and Political Conduct (2007). He directed the Leverhulme funded digitization and editing project on the diary of William Godwin. He co-directs the research project ‘Re-Imagining Democracy 1750-1850’ which has published Re-imagining democracy in the Age of Revolutions: America, France, Britain and Ireland (2013).

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Image credit: Page from William Godwin’s journal. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

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Transparency in investor-state arbitration

By Ian A. Laird

The recent adoption in July 2013 by the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) of the Rules on Transparency in Treaty-based Investor-State Arbitration marks an important milestone in the development of international investor-state arbitration. In the early days of this type of arbitration in the late 1990s, tribunals like those formed under Chapter 11 of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) were subject to criticisms that the process was “secret’ and thus not legitimate.

The new Transparency Rules respond to many of these old critiques and UNCITRAL can be applauded for the result of its significant efforts. In particular, the Transparency Rules include provisions addressing: the free publication of information and documents submitted in an arbitration (Articles 2-3), the submission of amicus briefs (Article 4), submissions by non-disputing treaty Parties (Article 5), open hearings (Article 6), and the protection of confidential information (Article 7).

However, despite the good news, there is a counter-tension in the transparency debate in investor-state arbitration in favor of secrecy and the protection of government information. A default to confidentiality and privacy has its historical origin in the commercial arbitration roots of the UNCITRAL Arbitration Rules, but was also evident in more recent statements by the UNCITRAL members in the negotiations that resulted in the new rules.

The tension was made most evident in Article 7 of the Transparency Rules, titled “Exceptions to transparency”, and specifically in subparagraph (2) where the critical definition of “confidential or protected information” is set out. Although subparagraph (3) of the article makes clear that a tribunal has the authority to determine whether a document is confidential or protected, this is undermined by subparagraph (2)(c) which states that information of the respondent State party to the arbitration designated as protected is determined by the law of the respondent State. This is in contrast to earlier negotiation text versions of Article 7(2)(c) where such determinations would have been determined by the tribunal.

Vienna International Centre. Photo by BambooBeast, 2011. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

In effect, by making domestic law the governing law concerning the designation of documents as confidential, the ultimate authority to determine whether documents should be made public is effectively taken out of the hands of a tribunal. In well-developed systems of access to government information, such as with the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in the United States, or the Access to Information Act (ATIP) in Canada, this may not be problematic as there are domestic remedies for when government officials err too far on the side of secrecy.

The problem will be that, with States that have no such due process mechanisms, and a policy default to secrecy, Article 7 could well force tribunals to apply laws that are contrary to the very transparency objectives of the new Transparency Rules. The domino effect of this approach is that State respondents may apply the same restrictive approach to the production of documents to the arbitration itself – thus impeding transparency and potentially violating the new rules.

Some members of the UNCITRAL negotiating group believed the approach which was ultimately included in Article 7(2)(c) could be “open to abuse”. Specifically the view was offered in the October 2012 session of the UNCITRAL Working Group that “providing for mandatory application by a State of its national law in relation to information provided by it would permit a State to circumvent the object of the rules by introducing legislation precluding the disclosure of all information in investor-State disputes. In response, unanimous support was expressed for the proposition that it was not permissible for a State to adopt UNCITRAL rules on transparency and then use its domestic law to undermine the spirit (or the letter) of such rules.”

The compromise that occurred leading to the final version of the Transparency Rules Article 7(2)(c) was the inclusion of provisions in Article 1 relating to the “discretion and authority of the tribunal” to promote the transparency objectives of the new rules and provide a mechanism for balancing confidentiality and transparency. As stated in Article 1(6): “In the presence of any conduct, measure or other action having the effect of wholly undermining the transparency objectives of these rules, the arbitral tribunal shall ensure that those objectives prevail.”

It begs the question: what if a respondent State only partially undermines the transparency objectives of the rules? How such a provision will be applied in future by tribunals in the face of a respondent State intent on maintaining secrecy will be an important test of the effectiveness of the new UNCITRAL Transparency Rules.

Ian A. Laird is a Partner in the Washington, DC office of Crowell & Moring LLP and the Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Investment Claims, an online law resource from Oxford University Press. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Columbia Law School and Georgetown University Law Center.

Investment Claims is a regularly updated collection of materials and analysis used for research in international investment law and arbitration. It contains fully searchable arbitration awards and decisions, bilateral investment treaties, multilateral treaties, journal articles, monographs, arbitration laws, and much more, all linked and cross-referenced via the Oxford Law Citator.

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Neanderthals may have helped East Asians adapting to sunlight

By Qiliang Ding and Ya Hu

Hominins and their closest living relative, chimpanzees, diverged approximately 6.5 million years ago on African continent. Fossil evidence suggests hominins have migrated away from Africa at least twice since then. Crania of the first wave of migrants, such as Neanderthals in Europe and Peking Man in East Asia, show distinct morphological features that are different from contemporary humans (also known as Homo sapiens sapiens). The first wave of migration was estimated to have occurred 7-9,000,000 years ago. In the 1990s, studies on Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA proved that the contemporary Eurasians are descendants of the second wave of migrants, who migrated out of Africa less than 100,000 years ago.

It has been reported that the habitats of Neanderthals and ancestors of contemporary Eurasians overlapped both in time and space, and therefore provides possibility of introgression between Neanderthals and ancestors of Eurasians. This possibility is confirmed by recent studies, which suggest that about 1-4% of Eurasian genomes are from Neanderthal introgression.

Adaptation to local environment is crucial for newly-arrived migrants, and the process of local adaptation is sometimes time-consuming. Since Neanderthals arrived in Eurasia ten times earlier than ancestors of Eurasians, we are trying to figure out whether the Neanderthal introgressions helped the ancestors of Eurasians adapt to the local environment.

Two major out-of-Africa migration waves of hominins. The purple and red colors represent the first and second migration waves, respectively. The circle near Middle East represents a possible location where main Neanderthal introgression might have occurred.

Our study reports that Neanderthal introgressive segments on chromosome 3 may have helped East Asians adapting to the intensity of ultraviolet-B (UV-B) irradiation in sunlight. We call the region containing the Neanderthal introgression the “HYAL” region, as it contains three genes that encode hyaluronoglucosaminidases.

We first noticed that the entire HYAL region is included in an unusually large linkage disequilibrium (LD) block in East Asian populations. Such a large LD block is a typical signature of positive natural selection. More interestingly, it is observed that some Eurasian haplotypes at the HYAL region show a closer relationship to the Neanderthal haplotype than to the contemporary African haplotypes, implicating recent Neanderthal introgression. We confirmed the Neanderthal introgression in HYAL region by employing a series of statistical and population genetic analyses.

Further, we examined whether the HYAL region was under positive natural selection using two published statistical tests. Both suggest that the HYAL region was under positive natural selection, and pinpoint a set of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) contributed by Neanderthal introgression as the candidate targets of positive natural selection.

We then explored the potential functional importance of Neanderthal introgression in the HYAL region. The HYAL genes attracted our attention, as they are important in hyaluronan metabolism and cellular response to UV-B irradiation. We noticed that an SNP pinpointed as a potential target for positive natural selection was located in the most conservative exon of HYAL2 gene. We suspect that this SNP (known as rs35455589) may have altered the function of HYAL2 protein, since this SNP is also associated with the risk of keloid, a dermatological disorder related to hyaluronan metabolism.

Next, we interrogated the global distribution of Neanderthal introgression at the HYAL region. It is observed that the Neanderthal introgression reaches a very high frequency in East Asian populations, which ranges from 49.4% in Japanese to 66.5% in Southern Han Chinese. The frequency of Neanderthal introgression is higher in southern East Asian populations compared to northern East Asian populations. Such evidence might suggest latitude-dependent selection, which implicates the role of UV-B intensity.

We discovered that Neanderthal introgression on chromosome 3 was under positive natural selection in East Asians. We also found that a gene (HYAL2) in the introgressive region is related to the cellular response to UV-B, and an allele from Neanderthal introgression may have altered the function of HYAL2. As such, we think it is possible that Neanderthals may have helped East Asians to adapt to sunlight.

 Qiliang Ding and Ya Hu are MSc Students at the Institute of Genetics at Fudan University and Intern Students at the CAS-MPG Partner Institute of Computational Biology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Their research interest lies in revealing evolutionary history of hominids using ancient and contemporary human genomes. They are the authors of the paper “Neanderthal Introgression at Chromosome 3p21.31 Was Under Positive Natural Selection in East Asians,” which appears in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.

Molecular Biology and Evolution publishes research at the interface of molecular (including genomics) and evolutionary biology.

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Image credit: Background map via Wikimedia Commons, with annotations by the authors. 

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