John Maynard Keynes: The Art of Choosing the Right Model

2019 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-85
Author(s):  
Bruce Littleboy
Author(s):  
Isaac Nakhimovsky

This book presents an important new account of Johann Gottlieb Fichte's Closed Commercial State, a major early nineteenth-century development of Rousseau and Kant's political thought. This book shows how Fichte reformulated Rousseau's constitutional politics and radicalized the economic implications of Kant's social contract theory with his defense of the right to work. The book argues that Fichte's sequel to Rousseau and Kant's writings on perpetual peace represents a pivotal moment in the intellectual history of the pacification of the West. Fichte claimed that Europe could not transform itself into a peaceful federation of constitutional republics unless economic life could be disentangled from the competitive dynamics of relations between states, and he asserted that this disentanglement required transitioning to a planned and largely self-sufficient national economy, made possible by a radical monetary policy. Fichte's ideas have resurfaced with nearly every crisis of globalization from the Napoleonic wars to the present, and his book remains a uniquely systematic and complete discussion of what John Maynard Keynes later termed “national self-sufficiency.” Fichte's provocative contribution to the social contract tradition reminds us, the book concludes, that the combination of a liberal theory of the state with an open economy and international system is a much more contingent and precarious outcome than many recent theorists have tended to assume.


2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 259-272

What idleness, leisure, and free time have in common is that they are the opposite of labor; all three are linked with the cessation or interruption of labor. The article takes Kazimir Malevich’s provocative essay Laziness as the Truth of Mankind (1921) as the starting point for an examination of the complex and fraught issue of the balance between idleness and labor. Malevich redefines idleness as grace, as the point of labor and its peer, and as something that is not only a release from hard labor but that also leads to peace and God. The author proposes a reading of Malevich’s apologetics of idleness in juxtaposition with Marx’s early focus on the issues of human freedom and on alleviating alienation in a newly arranged society, and with Paul Lafargue’s argument that workers would do better to fight for the right to be idle than for the right to work. The comparison with Marx and Lafargue reveals a fundamental flaw in their socialist program of heroic labor, which preserved the exploitation of labor but had the state rather than the capitalists appropriate it. Malevich’s argument comes close to certain insights of John Maynard Keynes in which he envisaged science and technology resolving economic problems by enabling humanity to enter an age of idleness and plenty. Giorgio Agamben’s philosophical deliberations round out the contemporary understanding of the relationship between labor and idleness. From this point of view, laziness and idleness become essential elements of meaningful labor. The option to remain idle, to reject work, to prolong it or to delay its completion are becoming the sine qua non of creative labor worthy of a free person.


Author(s):  
J. Anthony VanDuzer

SummaryRecently, there has been a proliferation of international agreements imposing minimum standards on states in respect of their treatment of foreign investors and allowing investors to initiate dispute settlement proceedings where a state violates these standards. Of greatest significance to Canada is Chapter 11 of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which provides both standards for state behaviour and the right to initiate binding arbitration. Since 1996, four cases have been brought under Chapter 11. This note describes the Chapter 11 process and suggests some of the issues that may arise as it is increasingly resorted to by investors.


2019 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guido Gainotti

Abstract The target article carefully describes the memory system, centered on the temporal lobe that builds specific memory traces. It does not, however, mention the laterality effects that exist within this system. This commentary briefly surveys evidence showing that clear asymmetries exist within the temporal lobe structures subserving the core system and that the right temporal structures mainly underpin face familiarity feelings.


Author(s):  
J. Taft∅

It is well known that for reflections corresponding to large interplanar spacings (i.e., sin θ/λ small), the electron scattering amplitude, f, is sensitive to the ionicity and to the charge distribution around the atoms. We have used this in order to obtain information about the charge distribution in FeTi, which is a candidate for storage of hydrogen. Our goal is to study the changes in electron distribution in the presence of hydrogen, and also the ionicity of hydrogen in metals, but so far our study has been limited to pure FeTi. FeTi has the CsCl structure and thus Fe and Ti scatter with a phase difference of π into the 100-ref lections. Because Fe (Z = 26) is higher in the periodic system than Ti (Z = 22), an immediate “guess” would be that Fe has a larger scattering amplitude than Ti. However, relativistic Hartree-Fock calculations show that the opposite is the case for the 100-reflection. An explanation for this may be sought in the stronger localization of the d-electrons of the first row transition elements when moving to the right in the periodic table. The tabulated difference between fTi (100) and ffe (100) is small, however, and based on the values of the scattering amplitude for isolated atoms, the kinematical intensity of the 100-reflection is only 5.10-4 of the intensity of the 200-reflection.


Author(s):  
Russell L. Steere ◽  
Michael Moseley

A redesigned specimen holder and cap have made possible the freeze-etching of both fracture surfaces of a frozen fractured specimen. In principal, the procedure involves freezing a specimen between two specimen holders (as shown in A, Fig. 1, and the left side of Fig. 2). The aluminum specimen holders and brass cap are constructed so that the upper specimen holder can be forced loose, turned over, and pressed down firmly against the specimen stage to a position represented by B, Fig. 1, and the right side of Fig. 2.


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