In this book, Andrew Harvey sets out to provide a unified and comprehensive theory of structural time series models. Unlike the traditional ARIMA models, structural time series models consist explicitly of unobserved components, such as trends and seasonals, which have a direct interpretation. As a result the model selection methodology associated with structural models is much closer to econometric methodology. The link with econometrics is made even closer by the natural way in which the models can be extended to include explanatory variables and to cope with multivariate time series. From the technical point of view, state space models and the Kalman filter play a key role in the statistical treatment of structural time series models. The book includes a detailed treatment of the Kalman filter. This technique was originally developed in control engineering, but is becoming increasingly important in fields such as economics and operations research. This book is concerned primarily with modelling economic and social time series, and with addressing the special problems which the treatment of such series poses. The properties of the models and the methodological techniques used to select them are illustrated with various applications. These range from the modellling of trends and cycles in US macroeconomic time series to to an evaluation of the effects of seat belt legislation in the UK.

Forecasting, Structural Time Series Models and the Kalman Filter

TH1OSE WHO WOULD CODIFY THE MEANINGS OF WORDS fight a losing battle, for words, like the ideas and things they are mneant to signify, have a history. Neither Oxford dons nor the Academie FranUaise have been entirely able to stem the tide, to capture and fix mneanings free of the play of huinan invention and imagination. Mary Wortley Montagu added bite to her witty denunciation "of the fair sex" ("my only consolation for being of that gender has been the assurance of never being mnarried to any one among them") by deliberately misusing the grammatical reference. ' Through the ages, people have made figurative allusions by employing gramnmnatical termns to evoke traits of character or sexuality. For example, the usage offered by the Dictionnaire de la langue francaise in 1876 was, "On ne sait de quel genre il est, s'il est mile ou femelle, se dit d'un homnme tres-cache, dont on ne connait pas les sentiments."2 And Gladstone made this distinction in 1878: "Athene has nothing of sex except the gender, nothing of the woman except the form."3 Most recently-too recently to find its way into dictionaries or the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences-feminists have in a imore literal and serious vein begun to use "gender" as a way of referring to the social organization of the relationship between the sexes. The connection to grammar is both explicit and full of unexamined possibilities. Explicit because the grammatical usage involves formal

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Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis

On exports and economic growth

The twentieth century gave rise to profound changes in traditional sex roles. However, the force of this 'rising tide' has varied among rich and poor societies around the globe, as well as among younger and older generations. Rising Tide sets out to understand how modernization has changed cultural attitudes towards gender equality and to analyze the political consequences of this process. The core argument suggests that women and men's lives have been altered in a two-stage modernization process consisting of (i) the shift from agrarian to industrialized societies and (ii) the move from industrial towards post industrial societies. This book is the first to systematically compare attitudes towards gender equality worldwide, comparing almost 70 nations that run the gamut from rich to poor, agrarian to postindustrial. Rising Tide is essential reading for those interested in understanding issues of comparative politics, public opinion, political behavior, political development, and political sociology.

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Rising Tide: Gender Equality and Cultural Change Around the World

Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature brings to light the deep sense of crisis within the profession of academic philosophy which is similar to the paralyzing pluralism in contemporary theology and the inveterate indeterminacy of literary criticism. Richard Rorty's provocative and profound meditations impel philosophers to examine the problematic status of their discipline— only to discover that modern European philosophy has come to an end. Rorty strikes a deathblow to modern European philosophy by telling a story about the emergence, development and decline of its primary props: the correspondence theory of truth, the notion of privileged representations and the idea of a self-reflective transcendental subject. Rorty's fascinating tale—his-story —is regulated by three fundamental shifts which he delineates in detail and promotes in principle: the move toward anti-realism or conventionalism in ontology, the move toward the demythologizing of the Myth of the Given or anti-foundationalism in epistemology, and the move toward detranscendentalizing the subject or dismissing the mind as a sphere of inquiry. The chief importance of Rorty's book is that it brings together in an original and intelligible narrative the major insights of the patriarchs of postmodern American philosophy—W. V. Quine, Wilfred Sellars, and Nelson Goodman— and persuasively presents the radical consequences of their views for contemporary philosophy. Rorty credits Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Dewey for having "brought us into a period of 'revolutionary' philosophy" by undermining the prevailing Cartesian and Kantian paradigms and advancing new conceptions of philosophy. And these monumental figures surely inspire Rorty. Yet, Rorty's philosophical debts—the actual sources of his particular anti-Cartesian and antiKantian arguments—are Quine's holism, Sellars' anti-foundationalism, and Goodman's pluralism. In short, despite his adamant attack on analytical philosophy—the last stage of modern European philosophy—Rorty feels most comfortable with the analytical form of philosophical argumentation (shunned by Wittgenstein and Heidegger). From the disparate figures of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey, Rorty gets a historicist directive: to eschew the quest for certainty and the search for foundations.

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

Special issue on the family: introduction

Marjatta Rahikainen, Centuries of Child Labour: European Experiences from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century , Aldershot, Hampshire, Ashgate. ix + 272. £45. 0 7546 0498 5

Inequality between men and women has been associated with economic backwardness. Although the causes of gender inequality were disputed, in the 1950s and 1960s, it was widely held that forces unleashed in economic development would lead to a convergence in the status and well-being of men and women.1 For example, modernization theorists argued that increasing reliance on impersonal markets to allocate economic resources was incompatible with discrimination. Moreover structural changes, associated with development, such as the increasing relative importance of manufacturing and at a later stage the rapid growth of the service sector, were thought to facilitate women’s involvement in production and therefore to increase their economic value. In turn women’s economic usefulness was seen as a key determinant of their relative status and well-being.2 But current research has questioned the spontaneity of links between the level of development and women’s relative status. Behind this retreat from easy generalizations has been an accumulation of evidence suggesting significant differences in the extent, pattern and terms of women’s involvement in paid work in countries at similar levels of development. If the comparative static fit between gender roles and economic structure looks less than tidy,the implication is that there may be only a weak correspondence between women’s relative well-being and economic development.

Gender Inequality and Economic Development

Child Labour and British Industrialization

Women have always worked. What has changed historically has been the form that their 
work has taken. In 1842, when times were hard, a miner’s wife reported that she “[got] a 
little to make up the rent by making colliers’ flannel shirts at 7d apiece”, paid for black 
lead and mustard “by any little job” she could get, obtained salt in exchange for the bones 
left from their meat, and took in a lodger!1 This woman’s efforts illustrate the problems 
involved in writing a history of women’s “paid work”. Historically, women made money 
and obtained things of value in many ways other than working for wages. They often did 
more than one thing at a time, they did different things at different times of year and at 
different phases of the business cycle, and they adapted their efforts to the structure and 
circumstances of their families.2 For example, at times and in places when work was 
organized on the basis of putting-out using family labour, women worked not for 
individual wages but for a collective wage determined by how much the whole family 
could produce and the prevailing piece rate. Their efforts and their pay were buried in the 
family economy. Such energetic and flexible exploitation of local opportunities to get a 
living is difficult to trace historically let alone measure, and so resists capture in modern 
terms of activity rates and occupational designations.3

Jane Humphries

Papers

Special issue on the family: introduction

Marjatta Rahikainen, Centuries of Child Labour: European Experiences from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century , Aldershot, Hampshire, Ashgate. ix + 272. £45. 0 7546 0498 5

Gender Inequality and Economic Development

Child Labour and British Industrialization

Women and paid work