In this note I would like to approach the question posed in the title, and in the literature, from a purely consequentialist perspective. In other words, I want to ask, would treating extreme poverty as a violation of human rights actually lead to a reduction in poverty, or at least lead to the conditions which would in turn lead to a reduction in poverty? This is not to minimize or deny the im...

Humans are a coalitional, parochial species. Yet, extreme actions of solidarity are sometimes taken for distant or unrelated groups. What motivates people to become solidary with groups to which they do not belong originally? Here, we demonstrate that such distant solidarity can occur when the perceived treatment of an out-group clashes with one's political beliefs (e.g., for Leftists, oppressi...

A model which explains national-level house price appreciation through utility maximization by rational voters is developed and tested using a global sample of 40 democracies, in order to explain why some countries experienced house price bubbles in the past decade and others did not. In the model, a subsidy funded by a tax on all citizens can be provided to home buyers. The subsidy leads to an...

most theories in social sciences have aspects of causality, but understanding the causes of social phenomena is not possible through statistical correlation tests. to overcome this problem, fuzzy qualitative comparative analysis was developed to identify the cause of social phenomena. having qualitative roots, this method tests the necessary and sufficient causes for the emergence of a social p...

Recently, the call to combine land change science (LCS) and political ecology (PE) in the study of human-environment interactions has been widely discussed by scientists from both subfields of geography. In this paper, we use a hybrid ecology framework to examine the effects of conservation policies on the environment and the livelihood of the people of the Korup National Park (KNP). Using tech...