Plea Bargaining as Constitutional Contradiction: A Comparative Study of Criminal Procedure in the American South and Brazil, 1804-1898

The Constitution promises people accused of serious crimes in the United States a host of procedural rights, including the right to trial by jury, protection against self-incrimination, and the opportunity to confront one’s accusers.  Yet today in America, 98 percent of defendants convicted of felony crimes plead guilty and therefore exercise none of these rights.  A growing cross-...

Human Rights Enculturation and Conceptualizations of Abuse

Cross-national surveys indicate that people are increasingly likely to denounce heterosexual men’s physical violence toward their spouse but that support for women’s refusal to have sex with their spouse is declining or stagnant. What accounts for these divergent trends? Bringing together theories of enculturation and vernacularization, I contend that international organizations' vast initiatives to denounce gender violence are an important contributor to both trends. When implemented,...

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity

By Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson

A thousand years of history and contemporary evidence make one thing clear: progress depends on the choices we make about technology. New ways of organizing production and communication can either serve the narrow interests of an elite or become the foundation for widespread prosperity.

The wealth generated by technological improvements in agriculture during the European Middle Ages was captured by the nobility and used to...

Thinking like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy

Between the 1960s and the 1980s, an economic style of reasoning—one focused on efficiency, incentives, choice, and competition—became prominent within U.S. public policy, including in domains that were once not seen as particularly “economic”. Drawing on historical research on policy domains ranging from environmental to welfare to antitrust policy, I show how particular intellectual communities introduced and disseminated this style of reasoning, and examine its lasting...