Showing papers by "London School of Economics and Political Science published in 1977"

Non-Linear Social Welfare Functions: A Reply to Professor Harsanyi

Abstract: A preliminary point first. John Harsanyi’s (1977) rejoinder is concerned exclusively with a relatively small part of my lecture (1977), viz., that dealing with Harsanyi’s critique of non-linear social welfare functions. All the formal results, e.g., (T.1) – (T.4), and much of the informal discussion in my lecture were concerned with other issues. While I find Harsanyi’s critique of non-linear social welfare functions interesting and important, and welcome this opportunity of discussing further why I disagree with him, I would certainly like to avoid generating the impression that Harsanyi and I are battling on the main substance of my lecture.

An interference analysis of crowding

Abstract: The behavioral consequences of crowding are analyzed in terms of mediation by the amount of interference experienced in a setting. It is argued that the amount of interference is the major determinant of crowding stress and one of several determinants of the subjective feeling of being crowded. Research implications of this analysis are discussed.

Child Guidance and Delinquency in a London Borough

Abstract: Patterns of child guidance referral and of juvenile delinquency in a metropolitan borough were examined in relation to neighbourhood and school. The two sets of rates showed similar trends among 20 electoral wards, both being related to socioeconomic indices. They also varied widely among the 100 schools in the borough, being higher for schools of low privilege in the educational system. The school rates appeared to vary independently of neighbourhood effects.

The Theory of Mass Society

Abstract: In George Gissing’s novel New Grub Street (1891), two representatives of the new world of mass publishing are cynically discussing the profitable living and potential fortune which await them if they transform the semi-popular paper Chat into Chit-Chat and the serious Tatler into Tittle-Tattle. And why? Because the late nineteenth century is the age of mass democracy and universal semi-literacy: ‘I would have the paper address itself to the quarter-educated … the great new generation that is being turned out by the Board schools, the young men and women who can just read but are incapable of sustained attention. People of this sort want something to occupy them in trains and on the buses and tram … what they want is the lightest and frothiest of chit-chatty information — bits of stories, bits of description, bits of scandal, bits of jokes, bits of statistics. … Everything must be very short, two inches at the utmost; their attention can’t sustain itself beyond two inches. Even chat is too solid for them: they want chit-chat.’1 In almost identical language, a modern critic writes of the ‘shapeless sprawling and anti-human’ environment of modern mass society in which people ‘read manic journals and magazines’ as they journey to the ‘meaningless tasks’ of work to find relief only ‘in office flirtations, pin-up and pop-singer cults, film and television talk, cosmetic and fashion preoccupations’.2

Mach, Einstein, and the Rise of Modern Science

Abstract: The specific problem to which this article is addressed is: did Mach's philosophy of science play a significant role in the genesis of Relativity Theory? The thesis that it did is widely held and was recently given a sharp formulation by Kenneth Schaffner in his [1974] article. This problem is part of a much wider issue: did positivism exert a positive influence on the progress of modern science? Or a baneful influence? Or practically no influence at all? There is a widely held view, voiced mainly by Born and Bridgman,' that the modern scientific revolution is the outcome of a positivistic revolution in the philosophy of science. Against this view, I propose to show that positivism was largely irrelevant to the development of modern physics; while paying lip-service to Machian positivism, scientists like Einstein remained old-fashioned realists. Had Einstein

The social anthropology of Radcliffe-Brown

Abstract: Part I: Structure and Function1. Introduction2. On social structure3. Letter to Levi-Strauss4. 'Function', 'meaning' and 'functional consistency'5. Functionalism: a protest6. The comparative method in social anthropologyPart II: Rites and Values7. The interpretation of Andaman Island ceremonies8. Religion and societyPart III: The Study of Kinship Systems9. The social organization of Australian tribes10. On joking relationships11. Systems of kinship and marriage

On Measuring the Redistribution of Lifetime Income

Abstract: Much so-called redistribution is between similar people at different stages of life or fortune. The proper approach, therefore, is to look at redistribution between lifetime incomes. But this raises problems of choosing the discount rate and of specifying the assumptions about alternative policies. After discussion of these, attention is focused on specific problems that arise in relation to education, especially the distinction between incidence on parents and on children. Finally, the lifetime approach is applied to various educational policy options in Britain. Here only the effects on children are examined, using a new British earnings function. For any policy, this generates a distribution of incomes (present values). Each distribution is measured for equality, using the Atkinson index, so that a policy is desirable if it raises equality proportionately more than it reduces average income.

Before the Black Death

Abstract: MTM HE simulta neous publication oftwo fresh assessments ofthe early fourteenthcentury economy marks a significant departure from recent discussions of the problems raised by conditions in the countryside before the Black Death.1 Everyone has his own ideas as to what happened to the economy after the Black Death. But any attempt to account for what happened then by attributing it to simple causes is bound to be suspect. Consequently, historians have looked for predisposing factors to which they can assign some share of responsibility for the momentous subversion of the accepted order of things that took place once the Black Death had run its course, and have perceived symptoms of excessive strain or debility in the changes they find on the land or in farming policy during the half-century or so before its coming. Prof. Postan has always contended that the economy was failing well before the days of the Black Death; and his views have always commanded widespread support.2 Dr Baker has concluded, for example, from his examination of the JNfonarum Inquisitiones that "the high tide of medieval land colonisation ... [was] ... on the turn" in the early decades of the fourteenth century;' and Dr Kershaw, who has contributed a pastoral crisis in this period to the saga of crop failures with which H. S. Lucas has made us all so familiar, firmly corroborates his findings.4 Widespread support, however, is not unanimity. There are dissentients. Miss Harvey, using very similar records to those cited by Prof. Postan and by those who share his views, comes to very different conclusions;5 and Dr Watts has added his proffer to the range of her arguments and examples.6 1 E. Miller, 'War, Taxation and the English Economy in the Late Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries', in J. M. Winter, ed. War and Economic Development (Cambridge, I975); J. R. Maddicott, 'The English Peasantry and the Demands of the Crown, 1294-I34I', Past and Present, supp. I (I 975). 2 M. M. Postan, Essays on Medieval Agriculture and General Problems of the Medieval Economy (Cambridge, 1973), pp. I4,20I if. 3 A. R. H. Baker, 'Evidence in the Nonarum Inquisitiones of Contracting Arable Lands', Economic History Review, 2nd ser. xix (1 966), 5 I 8. 4 I. Kershaw, 'The Great Famine and Agrarian Crisis in England, 13 I 5-22', Past and Present, LIX (I 973) . 5 B. Harvey, 'The Population Trend in England between 1300 and 1348', Transactions Royal Historical Society, 5th ser. xvi (i966). 6 D. G. Watts, 'A Model for the Early Fourteenth Century', Econ. Hist. Rev. 2nd ser. xx (i967).

The plain truth about consumer surplus

Abstract: In view of the rapid growth in the number of economic journals since the War, and the consequent shortage of conscientious and competent referees, in view also of the political biases and personal predilections to which the economic analysis of others can be subjected, the ambitious student can no longer count on being able to follow the evolution of some specialised aspect of the subject through a reading of the main journals. A few of the pertinent articles will generally turn out to be largely in error, and of those which advance the subject in some respects some will have created confusion in others. So it has been with the recent literature on consumer surplus. True, if a subject is inherently complex, no expositional talent can render it simple. But in fact the analysis of consumer surplus is basically a straightforward matter, one which skill, patience, and misunderstanding, have combined to make difficult and misleading. The greater part of the unnecessary difficulty in this literature appears to have arisen from an imperfect appreciation, even among competent economists, of the full implications of the ordinalist revolution which, following the earlier writings of Pareto and Slutsky, was formally initiated by Hicks and Allen in 1934. The writings of Hicks between 1939 and 1944 produced definitions of consumer's surplus that are simple, unambiguous, and allocatively operative within a Pareto context. The concepts and the relevant analysis were further simplified in Hicks' Revision of Demand Theory (1956) from where they found their way into popular texts and surveys. And yet the journal articles on the subject appearing in the last few years1 have managed to produce complications and paradoxes which 1 Those in the better known journals include Burns (1973), Cur rie et al. (1971), Foster and Neuberger (1974), Glaister (1974), Harberger (1971), Hause (1975), Mohring (1971), Silberberg (1972), and Winch (1965). Zeitschr. f. Nationalokonomie, 37. Bd., Heft 1-2 1

Age at puberty in relation to age at marriage and parenthood: a national longitudinal study.

Abstract: SummaryA longitudinal study of a British cohort has collected information on puberty, judged by menarcheal age for the girls and the pubertal stage of the boys at age 14 3/4. This information has now been related to the ages at which these young people married and became parents. For the young men there was evidence of a direct relationship between degree of sexual maturity at age 14 3/4 and their ages at entry into marriage and fatherhood. For the young women, if pregnancy did not intervene between menarche and marriage, there was evidence of a direct relationship between menarcheal age and marriage age. But there was no evidence that these earlier-maturing young women became mothers at earlier ages than later maturers. This arose through the later-maturing young women having shorter first birth intervals than the earlier maturers. Premarital conceptions were also more prevalent amongst the later maturers.

Dimensionality of Rotter's I-E Scale in a Society in the Process of Modernization

Abstract: A factor analysis is presented of the responses of 170 Brazilian women to a Portuguese version of Rotter's l-E scale The analysis suggests the existence of two main independent factors, one which could be said to correspond to the original meaning intended for the scale and the other to the concept of fatalism These results are compared to previous ones, and suggestions are offered to explain differences between the present findings and those of other authors The importance of prior validation of a measuring device used in research involving cross-cultural comparisons is emphasized

Some problems in the use of Almon's technique in the estimation of distributed lags

Abstract: This paper investigates some of the difficulties of using Almon's technique in the estimation of distributed lags. After a theoretical discussion of the Almon model, formulated both in terms of transformation of the independent variable(s) and as a set of constraints on the parameters, a critical analysis of the conventional criteria for choosing the “best” model (such as goodness of fit, the statistical significance of the individual parameter estimate or their sums, and an analysis of autocorrelation) demonstrates the problems of choosing the appropriate combination of lag length and degree of polynomial. These problems are illustrated by an empirical example, which re-estimates some equations from an earlier study of financial capital flows in the U.S. balance of payments.

Scandinavian Christian democracy: throwback or portent

Abstract: Advanced secularization in the Scandinavian countries has not resulted in the elimination of “the religious factor” from political life, rather has it led to a resurgence with the recent establishment in Sweden, Denmark and Finland of native counterparts to Norway's Christian People's Party. The article first examines the development of the characteristic religious cleavage structures of Scandinavia, from the imposed uniformity of the state churches in the early nineteenth century to the relatively open and competitive religious cultures of the twentieth century. The interrelationship between religious cleavages and political alignments is then examined and an attempt made to explain the failure of stable religious parties to emerge in the formative period of the party systems. Finally, the circumstances surrounding the later emergence of the religious parties are described and it is argued that these parties collectively constitute a new species of the genus Christian Democracy, different in kind from Fogarty's Continental and Anglo-Saxon species.

The inbreeding coefficients of the Hadza

Abstract: SummaryA systematic tabulation is provided of the frequency of different types of inbreeding in the Hadza. Genealogical information was obtained for 931 individuals, alive and dead. Inbreeding was encountered with 165 individuals. There were 49 different types of inbred genealogy. No attempt was made to calculate an average inbreeding coefficient and the reasons for this are given in the text.

Towards a Unified Decision Theory: A Non-Bayesian Approach

Abstract: In his ‘Advances in Understanding Rational Behavior’ John Harsanyi (1977) raises, and answers, some very interesting problems. The one with which I will be mainly concerned is the problem of unifyingdecision theory. (He prefers the term ‘utility theory’ for a general theory that covers rational decision making under conditions of certainty, risk, and uncertainty.) Before turning to that I will make one quick suggestion concerning another problem that he raises: how can the normativeidea of rationality play a central role in a positivescience such as economics?