From Marginal Idea to Contested Alternative: Recent Developments and Main Arguments in the German Debate

There are, broadly speaking, two types of arguments connecting universal basic income (BI) to ecological purposes. The first, “minimalist”, ecological argument is an argument for carbon dividends. Carbon dividends are per capita cash payments distributed periodically to everyone from the revenue from carbon pricing, either carbon taxation or a carbon cap with an auction of emission permits. Carbon pricing is essential for meeting internationally agreed upon climate mitigation goals. Using most of the proceeds for dividends is crucial for rectifying the otherwise unjust effects of a regressive tax, and for making a steadily rising carbon price politically feasible. Thus, the minimalist ecological argument for BI is a strong argument. However, carbon pricing can yield at most a partial BI, insufficient for basic needs. The second argument, the strong or “maximalist” ecological argument, concludes that a full BI funded from sources in addition to carbon pricing can or will have positive ecological effects. The minimalist argument has been widely discussed, has many supporters, and is a strong argument. The maximalist argument has received less attention. This chapter focuses on the maximalist argument, evaluating its premises, including that a BI will facilitate a post-growth economy by freeing people to spend more time in less carbon-intensive activity, by facilitating work-time reduction and work sharing, and by reducing inequality. The initial hypothesis is that the maximalist argument is weaker than the minimalist argument. This is partly because some of the maximalist premises support egalitarian redistribution but not specifically in the form of basic income, and partly because some claims about alleged effects need further empirical support. The argument could be strengthened by making the case for BI over other forms of egalitarian redistribution and by empirical research on the ecological effects of BI.

The article examines the modern theory of argumentation, which was called the «new rhetoric» project. An interdisciplinary approach with a methodological toolkit of philosophical epistemology, social philosophy, logic, axiology, etc. is used for the analysis. Special attention is paid to logical issues of argument strength, structures and methods of reasoning, counter-argumentation, and truth value related to the pluralistic nature of modern argumentation practice. It was found that the modern theory of argumentation develops in the direction of non-classical informal logic, with the involvement of the theory of critical thinking. Its communicative characteristics, the importance of the audience, the dialogicity and polylogic nature of communicative structures, and its affinity with pluralism as a philosophical «doctrine of plurality» are highlighted. A pluralistic approach is considered as an alternative to a monistic one. It is proved that in the social concept, argumentation appears as a special form of the mind, which is used to solve issues that arise on the basis of conflicting values. This involves rethinking the concepts of reason and truth. A conclusion is made regarding the difference between demonstrative proof and rhetorical argumentation. The mind appears as a philosophical construction of the ideal audience, which replaces the universal mind and appears as the communicative mind of rhetorical genesis. Monistic argumentation is a form of rational reasoning, while pluralistic argumentation of the rhetorical type requires a form of reasonableness. Communicative intelligence manifests itself in contrasting forms of criticism or apology. The social concept of argumentation as a reasonable form, as opposed to rational demonstration, is guided by the principle of justice, which is carried out by means of the method of analogy with respect to value conditions through precedents. The difference between strong and weak arguments is based on this. A strong argument is such an argumentative form that arises in communication in a pluralistic situation and is inertially fixed by social practice as a precedent of justice, which testifies to its reasonableness. A strong argument is formed on the basis of social values. In contrast, a weak argument is not based on stable values, the principle of justice, which means it lacks reasonableness and causes distrust in the audience. Thus, the project of «new rhetoric» is a pluralistic construction of social types of intelligence formed by the audience in communicative situations in the process of rhetorical argumentation.

Editor—The recent developments in human genetics have led to the availability of predictive DNA tests for the hereditary subgroups of some cancers. During the past five years, genetic testing for...

This article explores argumentation in the genre of editorials. The objective was to determine the frequency of different types of argumentation used in this genre, which can shed light on the balance between objective and subjective elements. It was found that editorials exhibit a balance between strong and weak argumentation, with 41% and 55.6% respectively (3.4% accounted for insufficient argumentation). The dominance of weak argumentation can be attributed to the specific nature of editorials, which aim to present the editorial board’s opinion and influence readers. The genre under study is a powerful tool in media warfare and shaping societal beliefs and values. The minimal percentage of insufficient argumentation indicates a desire to refrain from overt manipulation. The relatively high percentage of strong argumentation in a genre categorized as ‘opinion’ is also explained by the functional aspect of editorials: since the genre transmits institutional opinions with the intention of influencing public views, it is necessary to maintain authority and a high level of credibility in the information provided. Strong arguments in this genre include references to facts, data from authoritative sources including statistics, experimental results, references to public opinion, and common sense. Weak arguments include personal opinions, speculations, predictions, intuition, references to sources that are not definitive authorities in the field, conclusions based on incomplete statistical data and facts with no obvious connection.

Off‐farm employment has become increasingly important as an aspect of resource adjustment and a source of income in Australian agriculture. However, it is surprising that there is a paucity of work on this topic reported in the agricultural economics literature. Therefore, we have drawn upon recent developments in labour economics in order to investigate off‐farm employment in Australia. A conceptual model of the allocation of a farmer's labour between farm and off‐farm work is developed and applied to cross‐sectional data from the Australian Agricultural and Grazing Industries Survey. A Tobit maximum likelihood procedure is utilised to test the influences of the life cycle, level of human capital, wealth, non‐wage income and farm income on the off‐farm labour supply of farmers.

This study examined the possibility that increased speech rate can affect persuasion either by acting as an agreement cue or through its impact on message processing. Participants heard messages that were either moderate or high in personal relevance, consisted of weak or strong arguments, and were presented at either moderate (180 words per minute) or fast (220 wpm) rates of speech. Consistent with hypotheses derived from the elaboration likelihood model, fast speech served to inhibit participants' tendency to differentially agree with strong versus weak message arguments under both moderate and high relevance. However; fast speech was associated with increased persuasion only for moderate involvement subjects, and this influence was mediated by perceptions of source credibility. Polarity of message-based elaborations predicted attitudes of both moderately and highly involved subjects. Thus, central and peripheral route processes appeared to be co-occurring for moderately involved participants.

aG X*~'~WO articles in this journal (i-z) analyze grassroots _ efforts to promote policies aimed at reducing firearm violence in the United States. Wallack and collaborators conducted more than forty interviews with key participants in the May i 5, 2000 Million Mom March '9 (MMM), an event they claim attracted more grassroots participation and media attention than any previous gun control event in U.S. history. The core message of the MMM was the need to protect children from harm. As one participant explained: "We had one common goal. It was for the children." The highly publicized cluster of school shootings in the late I990S played an important role in helping garner support. A disappointment of MMM was the low level of participation by people of color. Frattaroli conducted interviews with eighteen gun violence prevention advocates who operate out of six states and the District of Columbia. She concludes that grassroots advocacy in the gun violence prevention movement is a recent development, evolving in five years "from virtually non-existent to commonplace and influential in some states and localities." While much grassroots activity is directed toward the firearm, most grassroots discussions about gun violence focus on urban youth (minority) violence. Frattaroli also notes a problem with the lack of ethnic diversity among the advocates-the gun violence prevention movement is largely a white, middle class movement.

In this paper, an elementary mathematical model describing the introduction of a universal basic income in a closed market society is constructed. The model is formulated in terms of a system of nonlinear ordinary differential equations, each of which gives account of how the number of individuals in a certain income class changes in time. Societies ruled by different fiscal systems (with no taxes, with taxation and redistribution, with a welfare system) are considered and the effect of the presence of a basic income in the various cases is analysed by means of numerical simulations. The main findings are that basic income effectively acts as a tool of poverty alleviation: indeed, in its presence the portion of individuals in the poorest classes and economic inequality diminish. Of course, the issue of a universal basic income in the real world is more complex and involves a variety of aspects. The goal here is simply to show how mathematical models can help in forecasting scenarios resulting from one or the other policy.

The challenge of ensuring economic opportunities are made available to a country's population is a key function of any government. It is particularly acute in many developing countries where the subsistence economy is dominant and where limited formal employment opportunities exist. For such countries, reliance on cash cropping provides a central plank in earning foreign exchange. More importantly, it provides an important source of cash incomes for the largely subsistence‐based population. Papua New Guinea (PNG) is one such example with a significant rural population dependent on cash crops for their economic livelihood. This paper discusses the country's coffee industry in the context of its producers, most importantly the contribution made by small household growers, and the issues and challenges they face. The paper traces the emergence of coffee as a cash crop in the PNG highlands and discusses, among other things, recent developments in extension and points out possibilities for government intervention to ensure the continued viability of the highlands coffee industry. Conceptually, the discussion acknowledges the significance of relational economics and its underpinnings, particularly reflections of duality of labour, perceptions of coffee as cash crop and markets in the context of Indigenous growers.

The recent economic recession triggered by the global pandemic has renewed scholarly interest in the role of social welfare systems in supporting economically vulnerable families when they experience employment instability. This article unpacks the patterns of the cash and in-kind components of the monthly family benefit packages that US low-income single mothers accessed during and after the Great Recession. We used the 2008 Survey of Income and Program Participation and an innovative analytic procedure involving family benefit package plots, group-based trajectory modeling, and logistic regression modeling. We found that low-income single mothers more often used in-kind basic-needs packages and less often used packages that bundle a cash benefit or a childcare subsidy, regardless of their dynamic employment status. Our findings challenge the effectiveness of the US work-based welfare system in ensuring the economic security of economically vulnerable families and contribute to the policy discussions on unconditional basic income and President Biden’s American Families Plan.

Valuing Nature

This study explored the impact of positive mood on the cognitive processes mediating attitude change in response to a persuasive communication. Subjects in either a good mood or a neutral mood were exposed to either a proattitudinal or a counterattitudinal message comprised of either strong or weak arguments. Subjects were also provided with a persuasion cue that could be used to judge the validity of the message without processing message content. As expected, subjects in a positive mood exhibited both attitude change and cognitive responses that were indicative of reduced systematic processing. Relative to subjects in a neutral mood, subjects in a good mood showed attitude change that was significantly less influenced by manipulations of message quality, and tended to be more influenced by the presence or absence of the persuasion cue. Subjects experiencing a positive mood recalled less of the message, and their cognitive responses differentiated less between strong and weak arguments and more between the presence and absence of the persuasion cue.

Previous research has shown that respondents in sad moods are likely to elaborate persuasive messages and to be highly persuaded by strong but not weak arguments. In contrast, respondents in happy moods are less likely to elaborate persuasive messages and hence show equal, moderate, persuasion by both strong and weak arguments. To examine how mood-related persuasion effects might be moderated by attributions concerning the source of a person's mood, students were approached on days with either pleasant or unpleasant weather and were asked to participate in a survey relating to higher education. Participants either were or were not cued to the weather as a source of their mood. They listened to either strong or weak arguments supporting the implementation of comprehensive examinations for graduating students. Attitudes toward comprehensive exams were measured. Participants reported more positive moods on pleasant days than on unpleasant days. When the weather was not made salient, weather (i.e., mood) interacted with argument strength: When weather was unpleasant, argument strength had an effect on attitudes, but when weather was pleasant, argument strength had no effect. In contrast, when participants were cued to the weather, there were no weather effects on persuasion; instead, attitudes were affected only by argument strength. Implications, mechanisms, and directions for future research are discussed.

The nonferrous production industry has gone through a remarkable transformation in recent years in terms of developing and adopting new technologies. Most recent technology innovations have largely been driven by the need for greatly improved environmental protection in addition to increased productivity. The development of the more environmentally friendly technologies has accompanied other advantageous advances made in the nonferrous industry. They include the trend towards more gas-tight, continuous processes and larger plants, the use of increased oxygen enrichment in the process gas, better process control, reduced manpower requirements and plant operations with more skilled personnel. This has increased the competitive edge enjoyed by the producers that adopt such new technologies. Experience has shown that clean technology often leads to a profitable business, because its adoption forces the concomitant advancement of related technologies in addition to the avoidance of penalties imposed by the public on pollution-prone industries. Needless to say, there are other driving forces for new technologies, such as the reduction of operating and capital costs, improved product quality and energy considerations in terms of reduced consumption and utilization of readily available sources. The trends in the nonferrous industry towards more efficient and environmentally friendly technologies are summarized in this article. First, the authors discuss the fundamental principles of sulfide smelting processes and describe recent major developments in the industry. The discussion is centered on copper production, which represents the most important nonferrous industry. Finally, examples of important innovations implemented to improve the efficiencies and increase productivity are presented. This is a story of remarkable advances and developments made in the nonferrous industry over a short period of time. Further, strong arguments are put forth that the industry does not have to be described by terms such as “smoke stack,” “sun-set,” “dirty” “polluting” and other disparaging expressions.

Since the early 1980s, metonymy has progressively gained central stage in linguistic investigations. The advent of cognitive linguistics marked a new turn in the study of this trope conceived, not as a deviation from semantic conventions (contra classical rhetorical theories), but as a phenomenon rooted in non-language-specific mechanisms of conceptualization of the world. Acknowledging that metonymy is ultimately cognitive in nature, this paper proposes to consider metonymy from its multiple levels of manifestation, integrating cognitive, pragmatic, semantic, but also ontological angles of approach. Taking whole-for-part (WP) metonymies as a case study, I aim to show how recent developments within these respective disciplines can enrich our understanding of such metonymic mechanisms, sometimes without even identifying them as such. This paper proposes to establish a dialog between these disciplines on the topic of WP-metonymy. So, after a presentation of the most standard cognitive and pragmatic approaches to WP-metonymy, I will argue for the relevance of recent semantic investigations on quantity gradability, and for the theoretical importance of keeping these two kinds of part-reference clearly apart. I will show that the literature on gradability provides strong semantic arguments for doing so. Finally, connecting the debate on WP-metonymy with the ontological debate on property inherence will open the way for a formal treatment of WP-metonymy within ground logic.