Many of the debates about foreign aid and development assistance seem to pivot on different visions of the goal: development or just poverty reduction.
The implication operation on partitions
February 2, 2010 by
Partitions and equivalence relations In a 2001 commemorative volume for my mathematical mentor, Gian-Carlo Rota, three of his associates noted that “the only operations on the family of equivalence relations fully studied, understood and deployed are the binary join and meet operations.” This note defines the apparently new operation of implication for partitions, an operation […]
From propositional logic to subset logic to partition logic
February 1, 2010 by
From propositional logic to subset logic This note outlines the following sequence of ideas. First, ordinary propositional logic is reinterpreted as the logic of subsets of a universe set U, with the propositional case being isomorphic to the special case of U = 1. Then the category-theoretic duality between subsets of a set and partitions […]
The Fatal Flaw in Cost-Benefit Analysis
January 31, 2010 by
In Part I of this commentary on the Sarkozy-Stiglitz Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, the focus was on the social engineering perspective underlying the search for such an index. But at the end of that commentary, I noted that the Commission’s discussion of different indices was rather “academic” since there is one dominant index used in governmental decision-making: the monetized gains minus the monetized losses of cost-benefit analysis. A proponent of cost-benefit (CB) analysis would roll up all the Commission’s discussion into the question of the better “costing out” of all the direct and indirect impacts of a social decision.
Obama needs new job creation ideas
January 29, 2010 by
The Obama economics team seems trapped by rather conventional job-creation ideas, e.g., Keynesian pump-priming or tax breaks for small businesses, ideas whose main virtue is that they are better than the opposition’s ideas of more tax breaks for the rich. But there are other ways to increase job creation and entrepreneurship that have been hindered by the size-maximizing tendencies of American corporations.
Associational speech: Citizens United vs. FEC
January 28, 2010 by
What is the basis for the liberal-progressive anathema to corporate speech?
Property Theory and Value Theory 1980
June 18, 2000 by
This is an old (1980) paper published in the Yugoslav journal Economic Analysis and Workers’ Management. It shows essentially all the ideas in the modern treatment of the labor theory of property (i.e., using the juridical principle of imputation) coming together by that date.
Straight-line and Hoskold Capitalization in Real Estate Appraisal
March 24, 2000 by
Here is the paper you have been waiting for: Ellerman, David. 1994. “New Results on the Straight Line & Hoskold Methods of Capitalization.” Real Property Perspectives, no. July: 29–36, 80–81.