This article draws from the work of Michel Foucault to reconstruct an understanding of social policy and ageing in contemporary Britain. In many ways, policy provides three trajectories for older people; first, as independent self-managing consumers with private means and resources; second, as people in need of some support to enable them to continue to self-manage and third, as dependent and u...

Eliminating disparities in health is a primary goal of the federal government and many states. Our overarching objective should be to improve population health for all groups to the maximum extent. Ironically, enhancing population health and even the health of the disadvantaged can conflict with efforts to reduce disparities. This paper presents data showing that interventions that offer some o...

Someone reading empirical research relating human genetics to personal outcomes must be careful to distinguish two types of work. An old literature on heritability decomposes cross-sectional variation in observed outcomes into unobservable genetic and environmental components. A new literature measures specific genes and use them as observed covariates when predicting outcomes. Manski discusses...

Firstly, in regard to community perceptions concerning the advantages and disadvantages of institutional delivery care at the household level, results show that many non-users of health services held negative views on the attitude of health care providers. The findings do not stipulate which income or education strata of society actually hold this view; but future behaviour change communication...

In the past two decades poverty focused policy has changed remarkably in the South. This can be summarized as a shift from residual welfare poverty-alleviation strategies, commonly associated with ‘safety nets’, to social protection poverty-reduction policies. The latter in principle has a far broader mandate incorporating risk prevention and mitigation strategies, as well as the perennially ne...

Whf.n investigating any subject, the student of science should not hesitate long before endeavouring to frame some theory or general law by means of which all the facts known to him would be brought into harmonious relationship with each other. Such a provisional theory having been suggested, exceptional facts or out of the way occurrences will be of especial value in testing it; for either, be...