Parliament and Political Disengagement: Neither Waving nor Drowning

Political Economists are Neither Selfish nor Indoctrinated

Most professional economists believe that economist in general are more selfish than other persons and that this greater selfishness is due to economic education. In this paper we offer empirical evidence against this widely held belief. Using a unique data set about giving behaviour to two social funds at the University of Zurich, it is shown that economic training does not make people act mor...

Drowning or Waving

Neither fragments nor ellipsis *

Jason Merchant (2004, and Chap. 3, this volume) proposes to account for all speech acts performed with “fragments,” whether in discourse-initial position or otherwise, by appealing to syntactic ellipsis. Though his proposal is insightful, I offer empirical and methodological considerations against it. Empirical problems include: (a) His alleged “elliptical sentences” do not embed the way they s...

Neither separate nor equivalent

Evidence suggests that binding, or encoding a feature with respect to other features in time and space, can convey cognitive advantages. However, evidence across many kinds of stimuli and paradigms presents a mixed picture, alternatively showing cognitive costs or cognitive advantages associated with maintaining bound representations. We examined memory for colored letters drawn from similar an...

Genome Biology: Not Drowning but Waving

One could be forgiven for thinking that biology is in turmoil following recent discoveries that seem to undermine conventional wisdom surrounding the role of genomes in evolution (Ball, 2013). Is the vast excess of genomic DNA—hitherto dismissed as junk—indispensable after all? Are the effects of the environment often transmitted between generations regardless of the information in genes? What ...