Why Not a Nation-Wide Building Code?

Nation - building

Nations stay together when citizens share enough values and preferences. Homogeneity amongst people can be built with education, teaching a common language to facilitate communication, but also by brute force such as prohibiting local cultures. Democracies and dictators have different incentives when it comes to choosing how much and by what means to homogenize the population. We study and we c...

Modernism and Nation Building

Not yet a GM nation

" We won't swallow it " (Daily Mirror) and " GM comes a cropper as Britain says a huge No " (Daily Express) were typical headlines greeting the results of the UK's public consultation on GM food. The government-funded " GM Nation? " survey showed that only 2% of people would eat it. 95% were worried that growing GM plants would contaminate non-GM ones, 93% felt not enough was known about long-t...

A nation-wide initiative against venous thromboembolism.

There is a gap between knowledge and recommendations regarding venous thromboembolism (VTE) on the one hand and daily practice on the other. This fact has prompted a Swiss multidisciplinary group consisting of angiologists, haematologists, internists, and emergency medicine and pharmaceutical medicine specialists interested in VTE, the SAMEX group, to set up a series of surveys and studies that...

Nation-Building, Nationalism, and Wars∗

This paper explores how the increase in army size observed in early modern times changed the way states conducted wars. Starting in the late 18th century, states switched from mercenaries to a mass army by conscription. We model the incentives of soldiers to exert effort in war and show that as army size increases paying mercenaries is no longer optimal. In order for the population to accept fi...