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This paper presents a panel data analysis of general government spending on health, education, and the major components of social protection in light of demographic trends (aging and migration) and selected domestic revenue sources (personal and corporate income taxes) across 27 E.U. member states, excluding the U.K., from 2006 to 2018. The countries are grouped into developed and transitional economies. The model employed produces statistically significant and intuitively reasonable results for spending on education, old age, sickness and disability, and unemployment in developed economies. The author suggests that an omitted variable, lobbying, might be a determinant of the developed economies’ spending on health. In the case of the transitional economies that emerged from the former Soviet bloc, interdisciplinary research might aid in the development of a more suitable model.

What is the relationship, if any, between age dependency ratios (ADRs) and macroeconomic growth in low-income countries versus emerging economies? This paper probes the hypotheses that (1) ADRs and GDP growth are inversely correlated at both stages of development and (2) an equivalent rise in ADR is associated with a greater change in GDP growth in low-income countries than in emerging economies. The approach to testing the corresponding null hypotheses is to conduct linear fixed-effects regression analyses with AR(1) disturbances using annual World Bank and United Nations data on 38 low-income countries and 63 emerging economies over the 24-year period from 1994 to 2017. Model 1 is a simple bivariate regression of GDP growth against ADR by group; Model 2 adds population growth, unemployment, human capital (represented by Human Development Index scores), and technology (reflected in gross fixed capital formation) as control variables. The ADR coefficients have greater statistical significance in low-income countries than in emerging economies, but the differences themselves are more likely to be statistically significant in Model 2 than in Model 1, and tests of the null hypotheses produce mixed results. The paper closes with a comment on the implications for fiscal policy in low-income countries.

Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) sought to align economics with modern scientific thinking by recasting it as an evolutionary theory of the process of cultural development that unfolds in response to changing material and social conditions. Central to this program was his conception of the interplay between the instincts that define human nature and the institutions that give force to inherited ideas. This short paper characterizes the innately human propensities that find expression as communities struggle to survive in the physical environment, and describes how, in Veblen’s view, those instincts shape ways of thinking, or institutions, which prove in turn to be efficient factors of selection. In “Why Is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science?” Veblen said that economic change “is always in the last resort a change in habits of thought.”

This research note describes a cross-sectional study of the relationship between population growth and GDP growth across 181 countries, including subsets of 51 emerging market countries and 36 low-income countries. The bivariate model produces a statistically significant result only for the entire sample, while a multivariate model additionally controlling for total factor productivity and gross fixed capital formation generates statistically significant betas for all countries and the subset of emerging market countries. Thus, although the model with three independent variables (population growth, total factor productivity, and gross fixed capital formation) does not apply to low-income countries, it contributes to an understanding of GDP growth in emerging market countries (r-squared = 0.56). The author tentatively concludes that population growth is conditionally associated with macroeconomic development where investments in technology support higher productivity.

This is a translation of Georg Simmel’s 1912 article, “Der Schauspieler und die Wirklichkeit,” which originally appeared in the Berliner Tageblatt and Handelszeitung. In a society characterized by mass democratic movements, the general public’s understanding is that an actor makes a literary character real by conducting himself as such a character in such circumstances would behave in life. But this view, which makes the actor either a puppet of the role or an imitator of nature, loses sight of the fact that actors, no less than writers and portrait painters, are artists in their own right. For Simmel, it is axiomatic that “the actor’s art, as such, stands as far beyond the literary work as it stands beyond reality.” Guided by the play, the actor plunges to the same depth of reality that the playwright sounded, and, organically integrating the literary work and the truth of the world, he creates through his personality an inner unity that is his own incomparable work of art.

This is a translation of Georg Simmel’s paper, “Zur Philosophie des Schauspielers,” which was published posthumously in Logos: Internationale Zeitung fur die Philosophie der Kultur, Band 9 (1920-1921), 339-362. Given that a play is already a work of art, Simmel explores the relationship between the actor as a real person and the prescribed role he physically brings to life onstage. In the course of this study he explains, among other things, how the actor’s art differs from the functional roles people play in ordinary life, how it resembles painting and poetry, how artistic freedom draws near to moral freedom, and how two great actors can have strikingly different yet equally correct interpretations of the same role. Artistic creation in general, he argues, is rooted in a metaphysical depth of being, and acting is the most radical of the arts.

Byron Harris’s short play, “Exit Interview,” calls for interpretation. This essay argues that the play dramatizes a spiritual journey from intense involvement in everyday life to serene awareness of its impermanence. In this reading, one of the central characters, the Interviewee, would subscribe to a “moralistic therapeutic deism” as described by Christian Smith in the sociology of religion, while the other, the Interviewer, is closer to practicing a form of mindfulness as passed down in Buddhist thought.

Samuel Beckett studied the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer intently in the late 1930s. This paper demonstrates that familiarity with Schopenhauer’s major work, The World as Will and Representation, can contribute to a richer understanding of Beckett’s short play, Krapp’s Last Tape.