Actions of resiliencia opposite to the housing policies in the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina: the social organizations, the institutions, and the massive evictions

The current housing problems in the city of Buenos Aires revolves around two phenomena, the precariousness and the evictions, in a context that is conceived like housing emergency. In response to this situation, some institutional organisms and certain social organizations with territorial roots in the south of the city, began to take forward actions of resilience opposing to the massive evictions, which take place as consequence of the real-estate pressure, and were concerning to the hotels, pensions, tenancies, and usurped houses of this zone of the city. It will be analyzed the actions of resilience displayed by them in their individual and collective dimensions and their relation to housing policies.

On blame-freeness and reciprocity: an experimental study

The theory of reciprocity is predicated on the assumption that people are willing to reward nice or kind acts and to punish unkind ones. This assumption raises the question as to how to define kindness. In this paper we offer a new definition of kindness that we call “blame-freeness.” Put most simply, blame-freeness states that in judging whether player i has been kind or unkind to player j in a social situation, player j would have to put himself in the strategic position of player i, while retaining his preferences, and ask if he would have acted in a manner that was worse than i did under identical circumstances. If j would have acted in a more unkind manner than i acted, then we say that j does not blame i for his behavior. If, however, j would have been nicer than i was, then we say that “j blames i” for his actions (i’s actions were blameworthy). We consider this notion a natural, intuitive and empirically relevant way to explain the motives of people engaged in reciprocal behavior. After developing the conceptual framework, we then test this concept in a laboratory experiment involving tournaments and find significant support for the theory.