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In this chapter we discuss the cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) of public health interventions where there are combined, and potentially conflicting, objectives of increasing total population health and reducing unfair health inequalities in the population. Our focus is on identifying appropriate health inequality measures in this context to quantify the impacts of interventions on unfair health inequality and, where necessary, analyse equity-efficiency trade-offs between improving total population health and reducing unfair health inequality. We recognise that this requires a number of important social value judgements to be made, and so prefer measures that facilitate transparency about these social value judgements. We briefly summarise the literature on health inequality and health-related social welfare functions, and conclude that while valuable it is not entirely suitable for our purpose. We borrow instead from the wider literature on economic inequality, highlighting how this translates to a health setting, and identify appropriate measures for CEA. We conclude with a stylised example illustrating how we would apply a battery of dominance rules and social welfare indices to evaluate the health distributions associated with two hypothetical health interventions.

There is a puzzle at the heart of the history of the English criminal trial. Defendants accused of serious crimes were denied counsel, but not defendants accused of minor crimes. Why? Sir William Blackstone could find no explanation and denounced the rule as contrary to the “face of reason.” This article proffers an answer. The rule is traced to the thirteenth century and a strong view of the royal prerogative. Royal interests were at stake, and counsel would not be permitted against the king acting ex officio. The rule seems to have been distinctly English; it does not appear to have been transplanted from the Roman-canon law. The rule continued in England, bolstered by new justifications, long after its original rationale had been forgotten.

This note presents new archival evidence about John Maynard Keynes’ attitudes toward Jews. The relevant material is composed of two letters sent by Robert G. Wertheimer to Bertrand Russell and Richard F. Kahn along with their replies. Between 1963 and 1964, Wertheimer – an Austrian-born Jewish immigrant then professor of economics at Babson College – wrote to Russell and Kahn asking for their personal reminiscences concerning Keynes’ anti-Semitic utterances. In their brief but still significant responses, both Russell and Kahn firmly denied any hint of anti-Semitism in Keynes, thereby providing significant first-hand testimonies from two of his closest acquaintances.

Despite its stated intention to be independent, impartial and thorough, the 9-11 Commission was none of the three. The Commission was structurally compromised by bias-inducing connections to subjects of the investigation, and procedurally compromised, among other reasons, by (1) its failure to take up promising lines of inquiry and its failure to try to force the release of key documents that were closely guarded by the Bush administration, the FBI and various intelligence agencies; (2) its distortion of information about pre-9-11 military preparedness, foreknowledge of the attacks or attacks of like-kind; and (3) omissions of information related to the funding of the plot and the specific whereabouts of key officials on the morning of September 11, 2001.

These structural compromises and procedural failings converged to assure that the Commission would not challenge core elements of the “official story” of the 9-11 attacks. This failure was compounded by the Commission's desire to produce a final report that would read as a “historical narrative” rather than as an exhaustive set of findings on the critical unanswered questions that arose after the attacks. The Commission's unquestioning acceptance of the official narrative also meant that it missed a perhaps larger opportunity to challenge key myths associated with American exceptionalism. Thus, the 9-11 Commission ultimately functioned as an instrument of cultural hegemony, extending and deepening the official version of events under the guise of independence and impartiality.

This study compares filmic and televisual representations of fictional black presidents to white Americans’ reactions to the advent of the United States’s first African American president. My main goal is to determine if there is convergence between these mediated representations and whites’ real-world representations of Barack Obama. I then weigh the evidence for media pundits’ speculations that Obama owes his election to positive portrayals of these fictional heads of state.

The film and television analyses examine each black president’s social network, personality, character traits, preparation for office, and leadership ability. I then compare the ideological messages conveyed through these portrayals to the messages implicated in white Americans’ discursive and pictorial representations of Barack Obama.

Both filmic and televisual narratives and public discourses and images construct and portray black presidents with stereotypical character traits and abilities. These representations are overwhelmingly negative and provide no support for the argument that there is a cause–effect relationship between filmic and televisual black presidents and Obama’s election victory.

Neither reel nor real-life black presidents can elude the representational quagmire that distorts African Americans’ abilities and diversity. Discourses, iconography, narratives, and other representations that define black presidents through negative tropes imply that blacks are incapable of effective leadership. These hegemonic representations seek to delegitimize black presidents and symbolically return them to subordinate statuses.