Current thinking about development places individuals firmly at the centre of concern for analysis and policy. This paper explores why groups are important for individual welfare and social stability, and argues that horizontal inequalities (i.e. inequalities between culturally formed groups) is a very important but neglected dimension of development. Most attention is focussed on inequality be...

Emergency is very difficult to be predicted since the social system has complex and comprehensive characters, so while a public emergency happens, a reasonable, efficient and timely response and control mode to be quickly selected is important to decrease the loss and to reduce the control cost. If the public emergency response agency doesn’t rapidly forecast or estimate the potential loss, an ...

We demonstrate the critical need to identify social situation and instability factors by acquiring public social satisfaction in this research. However, subject to the large amount of manual work cost in subject recruitment and data processing, conventional self-reported method cannot be implemented in real time or applied in large scale investigation. To solve the problem, this paper proposed ...

This paper reviews the literature on the impact of ethnic diversity on economic development. Ethnically polarized societies are less likely to agree on the provision of public goods and more likely to engage in rent seeking activities providing lower levels of social capital. Initial conditions are important determinants of adverse development outcomes. The role of decentralization, democracy a...

es of incarceration for the dissolution of marital, cohabiting, and nonresidential romantic relationships. Given the considerable number of families affected by incarceration, the unequal distribution of incarceration across the population, and the potential consequences of family instability for the intergenerational transmission of inequality, understanding how the expanding penal system affe...

The paper provides a political economy theory of the Kuznets curve. When development leads to increasing inequality, this can induce political instability and force democratization on political elites. Democratization leads to institutional changes which encourage redistribution and reduce inequality. Nevertheless, development does not necessarily induce a Kuznets curve, and it is shown that de...

This paper reviews the literature on the impact of ethnic diversity on economic development. Ethnically polarized societies are less likely to agree on the provision of public goods and more likely to engage in rent seeking activities providing lower levels of social capital. Initial conditions are important determinants of adverse development outcomes. The role of decentralization, democracy a...

Recent work has found that the propagation of behaviors and sentiments through networks extends in ranges up to 2 to 4 degrees of distance. The regularity with which the same observation is found in dissimilar phenomena has been associated with friction in the propagation process and the instability of link structure that emerges in the dynamic of social networks. We study a contagious behavior...

Rational agents can express discontent with a given distribution of income by threatening to disrupt an economy, if such a threat is profitable. This paper describes such circumstances in a two-class model. Social stability constraints define the acceptable set of income distributions, the range of which is determined by the extent to which income-generating abilities are vulnerable to disrupti...