It comes as something ofa surprise to reflect that the New York Review ofBooks is now over twenty years old. Even people of my generation (that is, old enough to remember the revolutionary 196os but not young enough to have taken a very exciting part in them) think of the paper as eternally youthful. In fact, it has gone through years of relatively quiet life, yet, as always in a competitive journalistic market, it is the controversies that attract the interest of the reader and to which the history (especially an admittedly impressionistic survey that tries to include something of the intellectual context in which a journal has operated) must give some attention. Not all the attacks which the New York Review has attracted, both early in its career and more recently, are worth more than a brief summary. What do we now make, for example, of Richard Kostelanetz's forthright accusation that 'The New York Review was from its origins destined to publicize Random House's (and especially [Jason] Epstein's) books and writers'?1 Well, simply that, even if the statistics bear out the charge (and Kostelanetz provides some suggestive evidence to support it, at least with respect to some early issues), there is nothing surprising in a market economy about a publisher trying to push his books through the pages of a journal edited by his friends. True, the New York Review has not had room to review more than around fifteen books in each issue and there could be a bias in the selection of

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3507774.pdf

The New York Review of Books

The relative proportions of metal residing in ore in the lithosphere, in use in products providing services, and in waste deposits measure our progress from exclusive use of virgin ore toward full dependence on sustained use of recycled metal. In the U.S. at present, the copper contents of these three repositories are roughly equivalent, but metal in service continues to increase. Providing today's developed-country level of services for copper worldwide (as well as for zinc and, perhaps, platinum) would appear to require conversion of essentially all of the ore in the lithosphere to stock-in-use plus near-complete recycling of the metals from that point forward.

Metal stocks and sustainability

In a life-cycle assessment (LCA) involving only one of several products from the same process, how are the resource consumption and the emissions associated with this process to be partitioned and distributed over these co-products? This is the central question in co-product allocation, which has been one of the most controversial issues in the development of the methodology for life-cycle assessment, as it may significantly influence or even determine the result of the assessments In this article, it is shown that in prospective life-cycle assessments, co-product allocation can always be avoided by system expansion Through a number of examples, it is demonstrated how system expansion is performed, with special emphasis on issues that earlier have been a focus of the allocation debate, such as joint production (eg, of chlorine and sodium hydroxide, zinc and heavy metals, and electricity and heat), the handling of “near-to-waste” by-products, processes simultaneously supplying services to multiple product systems, and credits for material recycling and downcycling It is shown that all the different co-product situations can be covered by the same theoretical model and the same practical procedure, and that it is also possible to include the traditional co-product allocation as a special case of the presented procedure The uncertainty aspects of the presented procedure are discussed A comparison is made with the procedure of ISO 14041, “Life-cycle assessment—Goal and scope definition and inventory analysis,” the international standard

Avoiding Co-Product Allocation in Life-Cycle Assessment

The Danish Environmental Protection Agency will, when opportunity offers, publish reports and contributions relating to environmental research and development projects financed via the Danish EPA. Please note that publication does not signify that the contents of the reports necessarily reflect the views of the Danish EPA. The reports are, however, published because the Danish EPA finds that the studies represent a valuable contribution to the debate on environmental policy in Denmark.

/pdf/market-information-in-life-cycle-assessment-5fk7twgv6g.pdf

Market information in life cycle assessment

The Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity: Economic and Social Factors.

The recycling of non-ferrous metals

Is there room for environmental self-regulation in the mining sector?

Jamais la gratuite n'a ete aussi presente, vantee et disputee qu'a l'ere numerique. Pour le grand public, le gratuit surgit des gains de productivite de l'informatique et des telecoms, lesquels organisent la dematerialisation de l'economie. Grâce a lui, le progres technique etend le champ de ses bienfaits, mais aussi celui de la mutualisation orchestree par l'Etat. Pourtant, le gratuit numerique releve d'une autre logique. Celle des « effets de reseau », mecanismes economiques puissants par lesquels plus un bien est consomme et plus il est utile. Les effets de reseau transforment l'economie de la demande car un produit devient d'autant plus desirable qu'il est largement consomme. C'est le cas des innovations numeriques - Internet, moteurs de recherche, telephones mobiles, moyens de paiement electroniques, television, etc. - dont l'utilite, liee a la circulation de l'information, croit avec le nombre d'utilisateurs.(...). On ne propose plus du « moins cher » comme au temps du fordisme et de sa concurrence par les couts, mais du gratuit, catalyseur de deploiement.(...) Ainsi, le gratuit n'est-il plus une subvention publique mais un outil prive, une arme economique au service de firmes creatrices de marches.

Gratuit ! Du déploiement de l'économie numérique

The digitization of copyrighted goods and the dematerialization of their distribution over the Internet have caused a weakening of copyright, a key institution of the creative industries One reason is that, during the broadband roll-out, copyright enforcement costs have become superior to the estimated benefits of copyright This paper analyses the causes of this situation and suggests how a graduated response to infringers can decrease copyright enforcement costs The paper starts with a review of the economic literature on copyright that focuses on its industrial aspects It then analyses how, all along the distribution vertical chain, the consumer's impunity provides incentives to free ride on copyright, which rapidly increases copyright enforcement costs It finally depicts the graduated response mechanism and the voluntary agreement that initiated this system in France In conclusion, the increase in the cost of free-riding for the final consumer should lead to a decrease in copyright enforcement costs and to higher returns in the creative industries

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID1545465_code1038977.pdf?abstractid=1545465&mirid=1&type=2

Olivier Bomsel

Papers

The recycling of non-ferrous metals

Is there room for environmental self-regulation in the mining sector?

Gratuit ! Du déploiement de l'économie numérique

Decreasing Copyright Enforcement Costs: The Scope of a Graduated Response

Mining and metallurgy investment in the Third World : the end of large projects?