Conventional wisdom has it that large deficits in the United States budget cause interest rates to rise.  Two main arguments are given for this claim.  According to the first, as the deficit increases, the government will borrow more to make up for the ensuing shortage of funds.  Consequently, it is argued, if both the total supply of credit (money available for borrowing) and the amount of credit sought by nongovernment borrowers remain relatively stable, as is often supposed, then the price of credit (the interest rate) will increase.  That this is so is suggested by the basic economic principle that if supplies of a commodity (here, credit) remain fixed and demand for that commodity increases, its price will also increase.  The second argument supposes that the government will tend to finance its deficits by increasing the money supply with insufficient regard for whether there is enough room for economic growth to enable such an increase to occur without causing inflation.  It is then argued that financiers will expect the deficit to cause inflation and will raise interest rates, anticipating that because of inflation the money they lend will be worth less when paid back.

 

Unfortunately for the first argument, it is unreasonable to assume that nongovernment borrowing and the supply of credit will remain relatively stable.  Nongovernment borrowing sometimes decreases.  When it does, increased government borrowing will not necessarily push up the total demand for credit.  Alternatively, when credit availability increases, for example through greater foreign lending to the United States, then interest rates need not rise, even if both private and government borrowing increase.

 

The second argument is also problematic.  Financing the deficit by increasing the money supply should cause inflation only when there is not enough room for economic growth.  Currently, there is no reason to expect deficits to cause inflation.  However, since many financiers believe that deficits ordinarily create inflation, then admittedly they will be inclined to raise interest rates to offset mistakenly anticipated inflation.  This effect, however, is due to ignorance, not to the deficit itself, and could be lessened by educating financiers on this issue.

A recent study has provided clues to predator-prey dynamics in the late Pleistocene era.  Researchers compared the number of tooth fractures in present-day carnivores with tooth fractures in carnivores that lived 36,000 to 10,000 years ago and that were preserved in the Rancho La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles.  The breakage frequencies in the extinct species were strikingly higher than those in the present-day species.

 

In considering possible explanations for this finding, the researchers dismissed demographic bias because older individuals were not overrepresented in the fossil samples.  They rejected preservational bias because a total absence of breakage in two extinct species demonstrated that the fractures were not the result of abrasion within the pits.  They ruled out local bias because breakage data obtained from other Pleistocene sites were similar to the La Brea data.  The explanation they consider most plausible is behavioral differences between extinct and present-day carnivores--in particular, more contact between the teeth of predators and the bones of prey due to more thorough consumption of carcasses by the extinct species.  Such thorough carcass consumption implies to the researchers either that prey availability was low, at least seasonally, or that there was intense competition over kills and a high rate of carcass theft due to relatively high predator densities.

The professionalization of the study of history in the second half of the nineteenth century, including history's transformation from a literary genre to a scientific discipline, had important consequences not only for historians' perceptions of women but also for women as historians.  The disappearance of women as objects of historical studies during this period has elements of irony to it.  On the one hand, in writing about women, earlier historians had relied not on firsthand sources but rather on secondary sources; the shift to more rigorous research methods required that secondary sources be disregarded.  On the other hand, the development of archival research and the critical editing of collections of documents began to reveal significant new historical evidence concerning women, yet this evidence was perceived as substantially irrelevant:  historians saw political history as the general framework for historical writing.  Because women were seen as belonging to the private rather than to the public sphere, the discovery of documents about them, or by them, did not, by itself, produce history acknowledging the contributions of women. In addition, genres such as biography and memoir, those forms of "particular history" that women had traditionally authored, fell into disrepute.  The dividing line between "particular history" and general history was redefined in stronger terms, widening the gulf between amateur and professional practices of historical research.