Demography and the social contract

Demography and the social contract.

As the most demographically complex nation in the world, the United States faces ever more formidable challenges to fulfill its commitment to the democratic values of equity and inclusion as the foreign-born share of the population increases. Immigration, the major source of the contemporary diversification of the population, provides several lessons about how to prepare for that future within ...

Agency, Cyberspace, and Social Contract

The social contract has been about rights and responsibilities in human societies. Facebook and its role in manufacturing and sustaining a global social contract, a new “we” is clearly one of the research areas that needs more attention. A new “we” is coming of age in the new age of connectivity and communication with a new outlook toward responsibility and rights at individual and collective l...

Social Demography

Demography and the Coronavirus Pandemic

Abstract. One of the most urgent policy issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe concerns the extent and ways in which demographics have determined different patterns of mortality between groups and regions, and whether and how the pandemic and its economic consequences will affect population dynamics in the future. Post-pandemic policy evaluations on the spread of COVID-19 and the im...

Conflict and the Social Contract

We consider social contracts for resolving conflicts between two agents who are uncertain about each other’s fighting potential. Applications include international conflict, litigation, and elections. Even though only a peaceful agreement avoids a loss of resources, if this loss is small enough, then any contract must assign a positive probability of conflict. We show how the likelihood of conf...