Social Security faces a severe financial problem. In about 15 years, the program will begin to experience permanent annual cash deficits, when annual benefit payments will exceed the amount collected in payroll tax revenues. By 2041, according to the Social Security Trustees 2002 Report, the Social Security trust fund is projected to be insolvent, meaning that the program will be legally unable...

Most philosophers, including all materialists I know of, believe that I am a complex thing—a thing with parts—and that my mental life is (or is a result of) the interaction of these parts. These philosophers often believe that I am a body or a brain, and my mental life is (or is a product of) brain activity. In this paper, I develop and defend a novel argument against this view. The argument tu...

Relations between the rural populace and the grass-roots levels of government vary enormously across China. A key reason, we have discovered during research in a range of rural districts, is that the very nature of the power wielded by a local rural government today is strongly influenced by the extent of local industrialization and, just as importantly, by the type of factory ownership that pr...

Traveling salesman problems with revenues form a generalization of traveling salesman problems. Here, next to travel costs an explicit revenue is generated by visiting a city. We analyze routing problems with revenues, where a predetermined route on all cities determines the tours along subgroups. Corresponding routing games with revenues are analyzed. It is shown that these games have a nonemp...