Preface – By Todd Litman This is a seminal article concerning traffic accident cost analysis and vehicle insurance pricing reform by Professor William Vickrey, winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize for economics. It describes how to determine the marginal accident costs of vehicle travel, identifies several problems associated with current insurance pricing and compensation practices, and proposes inn...

This article is an account of the dynamics of interaction across the social sciences and neurosciences. Against an arid rhetoric of 'interdisciplinarity', it calls for a more expansive imaginary of what experiment - as practice and ethos - might offer in this space. Arguing that opportunities for collaboration between social scientists and neuroscientists need to be taken seriously, the article...

The author critiques a paper by Zeba A. Sathar concerning the relationship between poverty and the infant mortality rate in Pakistan. The focus is on the socioeconomic determinants of fertility decline and policy implications. A reply by Sathar is included (pp. 258-9).

This paper offers a feminist critique of the relationships between gender and development by exploring the intersections between three sets of debates: firstly, the relations between interventions for women and for children through the anomalous position accorded to 'the girl child' in aid and development policies; secondly, the relations between psychological and economic models of development...

M arxists have seldom been noted for much economic sophistication in their critique of the capitalist market economy. Marxist reasoning was essentially easy game for Mises ([I9201 1990) in his classic initiation of what came later to be called "the socialist calculation debate." However, later market socialist contributions to this debate were for a long time believed to have provided the defin...

In his most comprehensive book on the subject (1994), Roger Penrose provides arguments to demonstrate that there are aspects of human understanding which could not, in principle, be attained by any purely computational system. His central argument relies crucially on renowned theorems proven by Gödel and Turing. However, that key argument has been the subject of numerous trenchant critiques, wh...

Fertility is a very old concept and many definitions are available in literature. The first edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française in 1694 defines fertility as: “quality of that which is fertile; good farming is that which contributes most to the fertility of the soil” (the capacity of a soil to produce a large harvest). A more accurate definition appeared in the 18th century in th...

This article offers an anthropological outline of immanent critique in Islamic traditions. In addressing the question – what is immanent critique? – it dwells on the interrelationships amongst the Enlightenment’s notion of reason, critique, and Islam. My main contention is that to construe the Western notion of critique derived from Enlightenment’s specific conceptualization of reason as critiq...