Bret L. Billet

The Great Recession provided an opportunity to reconsider how to simultaneously enhance the well-being of individuals, corporations, countries, and the global environment. A half-century of vital environmental data demands examining several questions pertaining to the impact of a recession on sustainable environmental consumption. Does a recession provide an occasion for productive dialogue that might reconcile the ostensible incompatibility of economic and ecological rationales? Does it constitute an artificial “turning point” whereby appropriate incentives may induce productive change? Are post-recession environmental consumption patterns indicative of government encouragement, and corporate willingness, to pursue transformative environmental technologies? Alternatively, are the patterns illustrative of countries transferring their environmental consumption to other countries via international trade?Bret L. Billet argues that the simultaneous investigation of both the Ecological Modernization theory and the Ecological Unequal Exchange theory strengthens the present quantitative analysis, enhancing understanding of the recession, well-being, sustainable environment nexus. Each ecological theory is rooted in the politicized evolution of traditional theories of economic development. The introduction of an Aristotelean conception of development as well-being, an exceptionally large number of cases, and the analysis of multiple country subsets, results in a more robust inquiry as to the impact of the Great Recession on the global sustainable environment.

This examiniation of America's national pastime explores the dichotomous relationship between race and merit in professional baseball. It critically evaluates the role that race and performance play in determining the extent to which the sport is representative of a culture that continues to harbor racist attitudes. The authors look specifically at several interrelated variables as they pertain to baseball and players salaries: (1) merit-performance statistics, (2) experience/qualifications-number of years of experience in the major leagues, (3) environment-metropolitan size/economic support, (4) race-various categories of race, and (5) salary requirements-salaries during earlier years of players' careers. Significantly, the authors find that, based upon the statistical evidence from the late 1980s and early 1990s, merit plays a greater role in salary determination in professional baseball than does the issue of race, despite the continuing charges in the press of racism underlying professional sports.

The debate between modernization theory and dependency theory has been waged for decades without either being fully accepted. Billet attempts to bridge the gap in that debate by evaluating the underlying causes of economic discontent in the developing world. The author's evaluation is based on a theoretical and empirical analysis of the interrelatedness of external forms of development capital and the implications of these patterns not only for modernization and dependency theorists but also for the least developed countries of the world. The purpose of this analysis is two-fold: (1) to evaluate the degree to which modernization and/or dependency theory is applicable to the experiences of developing countries; and (2) to evaluate why external capital flows have resulted in an overabundance of economically discontented developing countries.