Shadows of the Past:

A bstract . Sociologists have studied various forms of prejudice, but seldom their own. G. Wright Mills emphasis on the relationship of history, Social structure and biography encourages us to reflect on our own case. In the present instance, the attitudes and beliefs of a Welsh-American are examined in social context. Three implicit themes are revealed: (1) the sociological perspective is essential in understanding self ; (2) for self-knowledge no biography is more important than one's own; (3) the examination of the origin of personal prejudices may aid in understanding, more than condemning, those of others.     

Earnings dynamics in Canada: an econometric analysis

This paper reports the results of an empirical analysis of earnings dynamics in the Canadian labour market based on earnings data based drawn from tax returns between 1982 and 1994. Individuals' movements up and down quintiles of the earnings distribution are analysed using a hazard model approach. This represents one of the first studies for any country which models mobility across the entire distribution of earnings, including the middle and upper ranges as well as the lower ranges. The effects on transitions between quintiles are analyzed for the following variables: elapsed time spent in a given quintile (i.e., duration dependence effects), age, sex, geographical region, area size of residence, family status, language and overall macroeconomic conditions. One principal finding is that the conditional probability of transiting up or down the earnings distribution depends negatively on the elapsed time that an individual has spent in a given quintile. The earnings mobility patterns appear to be cyclical and exhibit some tendency of reversion to the mean, whereby the conditional probability of upward (downward) mobility is higher for those individuals presently situated in the lower (higher) quintiles.     

Book reviews

Quality & Quantity -     

Mao and the Chinese rural economy

The essay argues that Mao's economic ideas, though often couched in misleadingly ideological terms, are based on practical experience and can be described and analysed in familiar economic terms. It argues that these ideas had their precedents in the Soviet industrialization debate of the 1920s among Stalin's opponents; their parallels can be found in theories and policies developed in India and elsewhere in the 1950s; and their practical precedents can be observed in the pre-1949 Communist Border Regions, where conditions put a premium on labour-intensive construction, intermediate technology, and community development. In particular, these ideas owe a great debt to the achievements of the non-Communist Chinese Industrial Cooperatives of the late 1930s and 1940s. They stress the human factors in economic development, and seek to provide a specific process of social change and economic growth which will spontaneously develop mass consciousness of new economic possibilities. The essay concludes that if the Chinese economy is analysed in terms of the expectations implied in Chinese theory, rather than in terms of the economic expectations of advanced industrial countries, quantitative analysis of the Chinese economy may be possible.