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The Bureau of Economics in the Federal Trade Commission has a three-part role in the Agency and the strength of its functions changed over time depending on the preferences and ideology of the FTC’s leaders, developments in the field of economics, and the tenor of the times. The over-riding current role is to provide well considered, unbiased economic advice regarding antitrust and consumer protection law enforcement cases to the legal staff and the Commission. The second role, which long ago was primary, is to provide reports on investigations of various industries to the public and public officials. This role was more recently called research or “policy R&D”. A third role is to advocate for competition and markets both domestically and internationally. As a practical matter, the provision of economic advice to the FTC and to the legal staff has required that the economists wear “two hats,” helping the legal staff investigate cases and provide evidence to support law enforcement cases while also providing advice to the legal bureaus and to the Commission on which cases to pursue (thus providing “a second set of eyes” to evaluate cases). There is sometimes a tension in those functions because building a case is not the same as evaluating a case. Economists and the Bureau of Economics have provided such services to the FTC for over 100 years proving that a sub-organization can survive while playing roles that sometimes conflict. Such a life is not, however, always easy or fun.

This chapter fosters understanding of core U.S. gun culture and how it promotes its political ideology through visual means.

The research applies key visual theory concepts to investigate a selection of political representations made by gun rights advocates. The images analyzed include photographs, posters, and other ephemera posted on blogs and commercial websites located through informed keyword searches of Google Images.

Core gun culture in the U.S. aggressively promotes its libertarian and right-wing ideology through tactics of interpellation, intertextuality, and exhibitionism, often in tandem with humor, sarcasm, paranoia, and sex appeals.

Although the findings are preliminary, visual theories and methodologies present a promising direction for further consumer research on American gun culture.

U.S. gun culture produces levels of gun violence that far exceed those in other developed countries. Knowledge of how the core gun culture represents itself visually may deliver insights for mitigating this social problem.

Relatively little consumer culture research has addressed U.S. gun culture and visual theories have not been fully deployed.

From 1782 to 1834, the English social legislation shifted from a safety net devised to deal with emergencies to a social security system implemented to cope with the threat of unemployment and poverty. In the attempt to explain this shift, this chapter concentrates on the changed attitudes toward poverty and power relationships in eighteenth-century British society. Especially, it looks at the role played by eighteenth-century British economic thinkers in elaborating arguments in favor of reducing the most evident asymmetries of power characterizing the period of transition from Mercantilism to the Classical era. To what extent did economic thinkers contribute to creating an environment within which a social legislation aimed at improving the living conditions of the poor as the one established in 1795 could be not only envisaged but also implemented? In doing so, this chapter deals with an aspect often undervalued and/or overlooked by historians of economic thought: namely, the relationship between economic theory and social legislation. If the latter is the institutional framework by which both individual and collective well-being can be achieved the former cannot but assume a fundamental role as a useful abstraction which sheds light on the multifaceted reality in which social policies are proposed, forged, and eventually implemented.

Research on gender attitudes has consistently found that younger generations have more gender egalitarian views than older generations. Less attention, however, has been directed toward examining whether the generation gap has grown or shrunk over time and whether it differs across dimensions of gender attitudes. Using data from the General Social Survey for years 1977–2018,the authors examine the generational gap in gender attitudes across three components: views toward women in leadership, working mothers, and the gendered division of family labor between public and private spheres. The results show that differences between generations vary significantly across these dimensions. Attitudes have converged over time in support for women’s leadership, yet Baby Boomers espouse slightly higher levels of support than other generations, including the younger Generation Xers and Millennials. In contrast, consistent generation gaps are observed in support for working mothers, where younger generations hold more supportive views than respective older generations. Attitudes toward the gendered division of public/private sphere labor have converged between Millennials, Generation Xers, and Baby Boomers, with only Pre-Baby Boomers holding significantly more traditional views. Collectively, these trends highlight how cultural change through cohort replacement does not uniformly advance gender egalitarian ideologies. Instead, these shifts vary across specific dimensions of gender attitudes.