Swetha Subramanian

This paper is concerned to make three points about money-metric poverty in India: first, that the standard poverty-line approach to measuring poverty considerably underestimates poverty, and that the particular protocols by which India’s official poverty lines are determined are arbitrary and misleading; second, that a view of poverty in which the achievement of a satisfactory level of income is seen as a valuable end in itself, and which is captured in something like Kaushik Basu’s ‘quintile income statistic’, suggests a high order of income-poverty in the country which belies the relatively encouraging trends exhibited by headcount ratios based on official poverty lines; and third, that the continued co-existence of large amounts of poverty with large amounts of inequality needs to be redeemed by some deliberate redistributive strategy aimed at providing something like a guaranteed basic minimum income to every citizen of the country—for reasons, at least, of self-interest, if not justice.

The following is a sequel to the narrative "Jeeves Takes Charge," first published in the Saturday Evening Post of November 1916, in which Lady Florence Craye is reported to have plans for getting Bertie Wooster to read Nietzsche. The threat, in the present account, is executed. While it is not clear if the provenance of this sequel can actually be traced back to P. G. Wodehouse, the submitter has expressed the strong belief that the piece stands an excellent chance of turning out, at the least, to be a genuine forgery.Correct me if I am wrong, but I have the distinct impression that I have mentioned the name Florence Craye before in these reminiscences of mine, if "reminiscences" is indeed the word I want for the...

To better determine the history of modern birds, we performed a genome-scale phylogenetic analysis of 48 species representing all orders of Neoaves using phylogenomic methods created to handle genome-scale data.We recovered a highly resolved tree that confirms previously controversial sister or close relationships.We identified the first divergence in Neoaves, two groups we named Passerea and Columbea, representing independent lineages of diverse and convergently evolved land and water bird species. Among Passerea, we infer the common ancestor of core landbirds to have been an apex predator and confirm independent gains of vocal learning. Among Columbea, we identify pigeons and flamingoes as belonging to sister clades. Even with whole genomes, some of the earliest branches in Neoaves proved challenging to resolve, which was best explained by massive protein-coding sequence convergence and high levels of incomplete lineage sorting that occurred during a rapid radiation after the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction event about 66 million years ago.

This paper demonstrates that the property of Replication Invariance, generally considered to be an innocuous requirement for the extension of fixed-population poverty comparisons to variable-population contexts, is incompatible with other plausible variable- and fixed-population axioms. This fact raises questions about what constitutes an appropriate headcount assessment of poverty, in terms of whether one should focus on the proportion, or the absolute numbers, of the population in poverty. This observation, in turn, has important implications for tracking poverty and setting targets for its reduction or elimination.