Brian Thompson is a Senior Nutrition Officer at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). FAO is an intergovernmental organization, it has 191 Member Nations, two associate members and one member organization, the European Union. As a knowledge organization, FAO creates and shares critical information about food, agriculture and natural resources in the form of global public goods. FAO plays a connector role, through identifying and working with different partners with established expertise, and facilitating a dialogue between those who have the knowledge and those who need it. By turning knowledge into action, FAO links the field to national, regional and global initiatives in a mutually reinforcing cycle. Its mandate is to raise levels of nutrition and standards of living. What is the size of the malnutrition problem and what regions are most affected? There are persistently high levels of undernutrition. Nearly 870 million people in the world go to bed hungry (1 in 8 people) according to the recently released report of The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2012 (SOFI) and 2 billion have some form of micronutrient malnutrition – this constitutes a crime against humanity and is a responsibility for all of us. Prevalence of undernourishment in developing countries has declined over the past two decades, from 23 to 15 percent. In terms of total numbers in 1990– 92, around 980 million individuals were estimated to be undernourished. The number dropped to 901 million in 1999– 2001, to 885 million in 2006–06 and to 852 million in 2007–09. The financial crisis, economic downturn, persistent food price volatility, drought and other repercussions of climate change since 2006–08 may have prevented any further significant improvements in the number of people who are undernourished in developing countries since then. Africa has by far the highest prevalence, at around 23 percent in 2010–12 but though it is down from what it was in 1990–92 (27 percent) the numbers have risen from 175 million to 239 million with nearly 20 million added in the past four years. In subSaharan Africa, the modest progress achieved in recent years up to 2007 was reversed, with hunger rising 2 percent per year since then. In Asia, both prevalence and numbers dropped over the same period from 24 percent (739 million) to 14 percent (563 million). Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) boasts the lowest rate of undernourishment (8 percent) among developing country regions but the rate of progress has slowed recently. Countries considered as leastdeveloped countries and lowincome economies have the highest prevalence rates of all around 30 percent but down from the 40 percent levels of twenty years ago.

Interview ラン・ラン

Pour Michel Foucault, notre conception de la folie comme « maladie mentale » est le produit de notre culture et de notre histoire

Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique

The emergence of probability: A philosophical study of early ideas about probability, induction and statistical inference

Introduction 1. Understanding human behavior 2. The incorporation of von Neumann and Morgenstern's behavioral axioms in economics and psychology 3. 'Measurement theory in psychology is behavior theory' 4. Kahneman and Tversky: heuristics, biases, and prospects for psychology and economics 5. Incorporating psychological experiments in economics and the construction of behavioral economics 6. Building and defining behavioral economics Epilogue.

Behavioral Economics: A History

The basic thesis of this article is that the essential origins of the modern ‘financial revolution’ were the late-medieval responses, civic and mercantile, to financial impediments from both Church and State, concerning the usury doctrine, that reached their harmful fruition in the later thirteenth and early fourteenth century. That ‘financial revolution’, in terms of those national institutions for government borrowing and international finance, involving negotiable securities, in the form of annuities or rentes, and bills of exchange, is generally thought to have originated in eighteenth century England; but as James Tracy has earlier shown it first took place, on a fully national basis, in the sixteenth-century Habsburg Netherlands. The major obstacle from the Church was of course the usury doctrine, and more accurately the final evolution of this doctrine in Scholastic theology and canon law, along with the intensification of the campaign against usury from the early thirteenth century. The major obstacles that the State provided, with the spreading stain of ever more disruptive international warfare from the 1280s, were the nationalistic bullionist philosophies and related monetary-fiscal policies (to finance warfare) that together hindered the international flow of specie in later medieval Europe. For public borrowing, one must begin with the contentious policies of Venice, Florence, and other Italian city states in basing their finances on forced loans, which did pay interest, and thus with the usury controversies that erupted, over not just such loans, but the sale of interest-bearing debt certificates in secondary markets. The alternative solution, found elsewhere – first in northern French towns from the 1220s -- and one that would govern European public finance up to the nineteenth century, was to raise funds for urban governments through the sale of rentes, both life-rents (one or two lives) and hereditary or perpetual rents. These were not in fact loans but annuities, and hence they were not usurious, because the buyer of such rentes had no expectation of repayment (unless the government chose to redeem them); instead they represented the purchase of a continuous future stream of income (for at least one lifetime). Those rentiers who sought to regain some part of their invested capital had only one recourse: to seek out buyers in secondary markets. The true efficiency of modern public finance also rested upon the development of such markets and thus upon the development of full-fledged negotiablity; and public finance also depends upon satisfactory instruments to permit low risk, low cost international remittances. The solution to both problems lay in the development of the negotiable bill of exchange. Such bills, at first non-negotiable, emerged in the late thirteenth century as a response to circumvent not only the usury doctrine (to ‘disguise’ interest payments in the exchange rate) but also the almost universal bans on bullion exports. Yet another barrier that medieval English merchants faced was the virtual absence of deposit-banking because of the crown’s strict monopoly on the coinage and money supply, so that the usual origin of such banking, in private money-changing, was unavailable. Although English merchants sought remedies by using transferable commercial bills, they were not truly negotiable, for they had no legal standing in Common Law courts. But from the late thirteenth century, the Crown was incorporating the then evolving international Law Merchant into statutory law, and it also established law merchant courts, which did give such financial instruments some legal standing. In 1436, a London law-merchant court was the first, in Europe, to establish the principle that the bearer of a bill of exchange, on its maturity, had full rights to sue the ‘acceptor’ or payer, on whom it was drawn, for full payment and to receive compensation for damages. From that precedent, and then from those provided by similar law-merchant court verdicts in Antwerp and Bruges (1507, 1527), the Estates General of the Habsburg Low Countries (1537-1541) produced Europe’s first national legislation to ensure the full legal requirements of true negotiability – including the right to sue intervening assignees to whom bills had been transferred in payment. These Estates-General also legalized interest payments (up to 12%), thus permitting open discounting, another obviously essential feature of modern finance, private and public. Antwerp itself, with the foundation of its Bourse in 1531, became the international financial capital of Europe, especially as a secondary market in national rentes – the very instrument that became the foundation of English public finance, in the form of annuities, from the 1690s.

The medieval origins of the 'Financial Revolution': usury, rentes, and negotiablity

The Allais Paradox and its Immediate Consequences for Expected Utility Theory

In this paper we want to explore an argumentative pattern that provides a normative justification for expected utility functions grounded on empirical evidence, showing how it worked in three different episodes of their development. The argument claims that we should prudentially maximize our expected utility since this is the criterion effectively applied by those who are considered wisest in making risky choices (be it gamblers or businessmen). Yet, to justify the adoption of this rule, it should be proven that this is empirically true: i.e., that a given function allows us to predict the choices of that particular class of agents. We show how expected utility functions were introduced and contested in accordance to this pattern in the 18th century and how it recurred in the 1950s when M. Allais made his case against the neobernoullians.

Facts, Norms and Expected Utility Functions

In this article we explore an argumentative pattern that provides a normative justification for expected utility functions grounded on empirical evidence, showing how it worked in three different episodes of their development. The argument claims that we should prudentially maximize our expected utility since this is the criterion effectively applied by those who are considered wisest in making risky choices (be it gamblers or businessmen). Yet, to justify the adoption of this rule, it should be proven that this is empirically true: i.e. that a given function allows us to predict the choices of that particular class of agents. We show how expected utility functions were introduced and contested in accordance with this pattern in the 18th century and how it recurred in the 1950s when Allais made his case against the neo-Bernoullians.

/pdf/facts-norms-and-expected-utility-functions-2xi4acnw5w.pdf

La notion de risque a envahi l'actualite. Ce livre s'interesse a l'analyse economique du risque. Le discours economique repose essentiellement sur un outil, le calcul des probabilites. La pregnance des mathematiques n'est pas en cette matiere une nouveaute, puisque les mathematiques du hasard se sont developpees pour resoudre des questions economiques. C'est d'abord cette histoire qu'il faut restituer pour comprendre l'elargissement de la notion de risque, de l'assurance vers la demographie, la finance, la statistique mathematique puis enfin la constitution d'une theorie de la decision economique. L'abstraction d'une telle theorie, si elle frappe par son elegance, ne laisse pas d'interroger : cet elargissement est-il legitime ? Autrement dit, tous les aspects de la vie humaine sont-ils susceptibles de se plier a un tel calcul ? Il apparait au fil des applications que la reponse n'est pas univoque : il faut donc reperer les champs selon la nature des theories qu'on leur applique et surtout selon leur statut epistemologique. Ce panorama des champs d'application – assurance, finance, gestion – ne se laisse pas resumer et invite a prendre une distance critique. C'est la raison d'etre de cet ouvrage.

La notion de risque en économie

The concept of acturial fairness stems from an Aristotelian tradition in which fairness requires equality between the goods exchanged. When dealing with aleatory contracts, this principle evolved, among medieval scholars, into equality in risk: benefits and losses should be proportional to the risks undertaken. The formalization of this principle gave rise to the concept of mathematical expectation, first implemented in the calculation of the fair price of gambles. The concept of an actuarial fair price was first theoretically articulated in the 17th century as an implementation of this same Aristotelian principle in the field of life insurance. For a practical estimation of fair actuarial prices it was necessary to build mortality tables, assuming that the major risk factor was age. Yet, in the 18th and 19th centuries, we find no agreement among proto-actuaries about the proper construction of these tables. Among the obstacles they found, we want to highlight their early awareness of the possibility of adverse selection: buyers and sellers could manipulate the risk assessment for their own private interests, in a way that would either make fair companies collapse or fair customers be cheated. The paradox in the concept of actuarial fairness is that as soon as it was formally articulated, markets made clear it could never be implemented in actual pricing

Pierre-Charles Pradier

Papers

The Allais Paradox and its Immediate Consequences for Expected Utility Theory

Facts, Norms and Expected Utility Functions

Facts, Norms and Expected Utility Functions

La notion de risque en économie

What was fair in actuarial fairness