Showing papers by "London School of Economics and Political Science published in 1973"

Why did Einstein's programme supersede lorentz's? (I)

Abstract: 2 Einstein's Heuristics. 2.1 Einstein's Appraisal of Classical Physics. 2.2 The Discovery of Special Relativity Theory: Removal of the Asymmetry between Classical Mechanics and Electrodynamics. 2.3 The Heuristic Superiority in 7905 of the Relativity Programme: Einstein's Covariance versus Lorentz's Ether. The Power of Einstein's Heuristics: Derivation of a New Relativistic Law of Motion and of E = me. 3 Einstein's Programme Supersedes Lorentz's. 3.1 The Continuity between the Special and General Theories of Relativity. 3.2 The Successful Explanation of the Perihelion of Mercury and its Role in the Further Development of the General Theory.

General Equilibrium with Taxes: A Computational Procedure and an Existence Proof

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to describe a computational procedure for the determination of a competitive equilibrium for an economy with producer and consumer commodity 3 taxes. This procedure enables a proof of the existence of such an equilibrium to be obtained. While no properties of efficiency are claimed for such an equilibrium, the procedure is of great potential use in the consideration of the efficiency losses and distributional impacts from alternative tax schemes. Application 4 of such a technique may be found in such areas as the tax reform programmes being discussed in the USA, Canada, the UK and other countries.5 We consider a general Walrasian model with an arbitrary set of ad valorem commodity taxes. The method of computing an equilibrium is based on Scarf's Algorithm [7, 8]. The tax rates need not be uniform across production sectors or individuals. The revenue generated from the tax system is dispersed among the individual consumers, each of whom is assigned an arbitrary share of the total, or retained by the government for the purchase of goods and services. The only restriction on revenue distribution schemes is that the shares (those of individuals and the government) sum to unity and that each recipient's allocation be a continuous function of total tax revenue. The major theorem of this paper is a substantial extension of the existence proof of a competitive equilibrium in the absence of taxes (see, for example, Arrow and Hahn [1], Scarf [7], McKenzie [6], or Debreu [2]) and is of particular importance if the general equilibrium framework is to be useful for the evaluation of economic policy regarding taxes and tariffs. Without such an existence proof, it is difficult to contemplate the computation of equilibria under various tax regimes. For convenience most of the exposition will be concerned only with an economy with differential producer taxes; the case of differential producer and consumer taxes is discussed in Section 4. The economy considered here is characterized by (1) a set of market demand functions, (2) a description of the technological production possibilities through a listing of activity

On L1 and Chebyshev estimation

Abstract: The problem considered here is that of fitting a linear function to a set of points. The criterion normally used for this is least squares. We consider two alternatives, viz., least sum of absolute deviations (called the L1 criterion) and the least maximum absolute deviation (called the Chebyshev criterion). Each of these criteria give rise to a linear program. We develop some theoretical properties of the solutions and in the light of these, examine the suitability of these criteria for linear estimation. Some of the estimates obtained by using them are shown to be counter-intuitive.

The Transportation Problem and its Variants

Abstract: For 54 unimodular linear programming problems it is shown that either (i) the objective function is unbounded, or (ii) the problem is infeasible, or (iii) the problem can be solved by solving a related transportation problem. The related transportation problem is obtained by adding at the most two new constraints to the original problem.

Labour Supply in Early Industrialization: the Case of the Bombay Textile Industry

Abstract: The problems of labor supply to the Bombay textile industry are examined. In spite of evidence of excess labor supply, there was an undercurrent of complaint of labor shortage, high wages, and high labor cost per unit of output. The notion that labor was migrant and thus not committed to the industrial sector is not supported by the data, nor is the hypothesis that strong institutional influences caused the paradox of excess labor supply and high wages with consequent labor difficulties. The preference employers have for a stable and committed labor force suggests that demand price would be greater than that for nonstable labor. This does not explain the establishment of the wages for such labor at a level higher than the supply price of the general of nonstable labor. This outcome is conceivable if, along with its high demand price, the supply price of stable labor was also higher, a situation that might occur if the bulk of the stable labor was composed of migrants who settled in Bombay while the nonstable labor was composed of migrants who merely visited the city. The hypothesis of a gap in the supply prices of settled and visiting migrants appears substantiated by the data.

Social Work As The Privatized Solution of Public Ills

Abstract: SUMMARY This paper takes the motivation of the social work recruit as the point of departure for an exploration of some aspects of the low-key politics of social work. Attempting to cut past stereotypical and occupationally agreed conceptions of why social workers enter their occupation, it suggests that the social work recruit's choice is most usefully understood as an attempted solution to central cultural problems in advanced capitalist societies, and it directs attention to the moral-political roots of social work. While the choice of social work as a career represents for some a sort of primitive political rebellion, the implications of this 'rebellion' are not grasped, and it becomes the privatized solution of a privileged minority. It is the purpose of this paper to explore the possibility that there exists a fundamental tension between the motivation which brings a person into social work as an occupation and certain aspects of our culture, and that this opposition finds some reflection in the relationship between social work's system of values and features of everyday life in urban-industrial society. The social worker is usually taken to be a neutral semi-professional ; it is my intention to champion a competing definition of social work by a presentation of the social worker as essentially a political deviant. In order to get this argument under way it becomes immediately necessary to clear the ground, for as he is commonly conceived the social worker is regarded as something less than political, and quite beyond the possibilities of deviance. Indeed, stereotypically, the social worker is conforming to a fault—grey, jolly perhaps, but uninteresting.! There is some support for this in Coxon's recent work on occupational attributes.1

The Black Death

Abstract: T | SHE fourteenth century was a century of violent contrasts. Unparalleled military triumph was followed by humiliating military failure and defeat. Kingship was raised to a culminating point of glory by Edward III who was, for contemporaries, the embodiment of the feudal virtues, only to be disgraced by a successor, his grandson Richard II, who had to be bundled off the stage amid scenes of public scandal and private degradation which moved one modern writer to conclude that "in the end the case for deposing him looked stronger than the case for deposing his great-grandfather".' And the century witnessed, in the unprecedented famines and epidemics that marked its course, an assault on the social system at its base which was infinitely deadlier than any which it had sustained at its apex by way of military loss or political subversion. Yet the result of this assault was to inaugurate a century of prosperity for the vast majority of the population, the like of which was not to be known again for generations to come. The new age, which was not without its problems for contemporaries, is not without its problems for us. Everyone knows that the extraordinary reversal of the established order of things which inaugurated this new age was caused by the decline of the population. But no one is quite sure as to when that decline began. It is tempting to look back on the succession offamines and pestilences that marked the course of the fourteenth century, as Mr Saltmarsh once did, and see the recuperative vitality of the population progressively weakened by loss and debility.2 But the statistics of wages and prices make it very difficult to credit this plausible account of what happened. If the population had declined substantially as a result of either the famines or the early visitations of bubonic plague then land should have lost value as its scarcity diminished. As rents fell, dragging prices after them, wages should have risen. Many years ago when Prof. Postan

Must the logical probability of laws be zero

Abstract: (iv) p is strictly positive i.e. if ju([a]) = o then \\a -> (b A b) where a and & are any sentences of L. This remains possible, moreover, when the axioms of L are augmented with an 'axiom of infinity' (so that the notion of contradiction is extended to include sentences true in domains of at most n elements). Now any function satisfying (»'), (a) and (tit) is formally a probabilitymeasure, and probability-measures which in addition satisfy (iv) have actually been used in investigations of probabilistic inductive logic, notably by Hintikka. Yet in Appendix *vii of his [1934], Popper claims to have proved (in more than one way) that where p(x) denotes the logical probability of some sentence x,

Cases and materials on the English legal system

Abstract: The 6th edition of this volume was originally published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in 1992. It takes full account of a wide number of major developments, including the final report and implementation of the Civil Justice Review, the battle over the Government's Green Papers for reform of the legal profession, and the Courts and Legal Services Act 1990. The book has been reprinted with a supplementary section on the recommendations of the 1993 reports of the Royal Commission on Criminal Justice, of which Professor Zander is a prominent member.

The Advocacy of Malaysia—before 1961

Abstract: A Formidable consensus of academic opinion exists on the question of the formation of Malaysia. In its most commonly stated form, this consensus is manifested in an explanation which specifies a date—27 May 1961—and sees Malaysia as the outcome of the attempt to solve the ‘Singapore Problem’. The movement towards Malaysia is, with dull regularity, dated from the Tunku's almost casual, certainly very vague, reference to the need for a ‘closer understanding’ between Singapore, British North Borneo (Sabah), Brunei, and Sarawak, and for ‘a plan whereby these territories can be brought closer together in a political and economic association’ which he made in the course of a speech to the Foreign Correspondents’ Association of South-east Asia on 27 May 1961. The Tunku's initiative arose, it is almost invariably argued, from the fear of future events in Singapore. Since the Republicwould in all probability be granted a separate independence by 1963,the British would no longer be in a position to control the island's internal security, defence and foreign relations. The Federation would be deprived of the Internal Security Council through which it had had (in conjunction with the British) direct control over Singapore's internal Malaya viewpoint if an amenable Singapore government could be guaranteed. By May 1961, however, the opposite appeared imminent. There were indications that the PAP was rapidly losing ground. In the Hong Lim by-election held in late April, its candidate was severely trounced. This, combined with the knowledge that no government had in the past managed to win more than one term of office, and full aware-ness of the seemingly perpetual leftward movement of Singapore politics, ness of the seemingly perpetual leftward movement of Singapore politics, created the impression in Kuala Lumpur that unless something was done, the Republic would become a second Cuba threatening the security of the Federation. The Tunku was convinced, so the argument goes, that the Federation had to ensure control over Singapore's internal security. A reversal of his previous stand on merger was, therefore, necessary. This explanation may be referred to as the security theory on the formation of Malaysia. It has a corollary: having decided that the incorporation of Singapore was necessary, the Tunku had to find a racial counter-balance to the island's Chinese population; the Borneo territories had to be included because it was essential that Singapore be territories had to be included because it was essential that Singapore be brought into the Federation of Malaya. Malaysia was thus the logicalsolution to the Singapore Problem. Among those who have propounded the security theory are Willard Hanna, Arnold Brackman, Gordon Means, George Me. T. Kahin, James Gould, Milton Osborne, Tan Koh Chiang, J. M. Gullick, Emily Sadka, Sir Richard Allen and Justus Van der Kroef.

The Mond-Turner Talks, 1927–1933: A Study in Industrial Co-operation

Abstract: There has been no full study of the Mond-Turner talks and the subsequent conferences between the Trades Union Congress, die National Confederation of Employers’ Organizations (NCEO) and die Federation of British Industries (FBI). This is largely because until recendy die relevant archives and paper collections have not been open for research. From the official government papers, the archives of the Confederation of British Industries and some TUC material, it is now possible for die first time to present a detailed study of diis series of talks, important as a major attempt at industrial co-operation at national level.

Survey Design, Symmetry and Posterior Distributions

Abstract: SUMMARY It is now well known that the sample design is irrelevant in a Bayesian analysis of survey data provided the units are labelled and the sampling is non-informative. However, information about the labels is often not available for the analysis, and in this situation the design will contain information about the labelling and hence affect the inferences. There is one important exception: if the prior distribution is exchangeable and we are interested only in symmetric functions of the unit values then the design is still irrelevant even without the labels.

Economics of scale

Abstract: This paper is based on the results of a study of university costs being undertaken in the Higher Education Research Unit, London School of Economics, directed by Dr. Bleddyn Davies. The study is based on cross-section data supplied by the University Grants Committee and the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals on current costs, inputs and outputs in all UK universities, except Oxford and Cambridge and certain institutes attached to the University of London, in the academic year 1968-69.

Polarization and the Established Group

Abstract: In research the general practice is for experimental studies to be derived from real-life observations, and particularly those from field research. The study here reverses this practice. A real-life situation has been discovered, the conditions of which correspond to those generally employed in risky-shift studies. The quantitative nature of the decisions made in the established group studied enables the data to be treated in comparable fashion to data derived from risk-taking and polarization studies. In the case studied here no shift in any direction was found. An examination of the possible factors accounting for this finding indicated that the two most important ones were the amount of information at the disposal of the group, and the reference system within which decisions were made, which was common to all the group members. These variables are put forward as worthy of further experimental analysis. Discussion focuses on the implications of research such as this for the external validity of experimental studies.