Utility Matters

2020 ◽  
Vol 52 (5) ◽  
pp. 863-894
Author(s):  
Matheus Assaf ◽  
Pedro Garcia Duarte
Keyword(s):  
Activity Analysis ◽  
Productive Efficiency ◽  
Maximization Problem ◽  
Mathematical Economics ◽  
The Road ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Standard Textbook ◽  
Cowles Commission ◽  
History Of ◽  
Utilitarian Approach

The present-day standard textbook narrative on the history of growth theory usually takes Robert Solow’s 1956 contribution as a key starting point, which was extended by David Cass and Tjalling Koopmans in 1965 by introducing an intertemporal maximization problem that defines the saving ratio in the economy. However, the road connecting Solow to the Ramsey-Cass-Koopmans model is not so straightforward. We argue that in order to understand Koopmans’s contribution, we have to go to the activity analysis literature that started before Solow 1956 and never had him as a central reference. We stress the role played by Edmond Malinvaud, with whom Koopmans interacted closely, and take his travel from the French milieu of mathematical economics to the Cowles Commission in 1950-51 and back to France as a guiding line. The rise of turnpike theory in the end of the 1950s generated a debate on the choice criteria of growth programs, opposing the productive efficiency typical of these models to the utilitarian approach supported by Malinvaud and Koopmans. The Vatican Conference of 1963, where Koopmans presented a first version of his 1965 model, was embedded in this debate. We argue that Malinvaud’s (and Koopmans’s) contributions were crucial to steer the activity analysis literature toward a utilitarian analysis of growth paths.

The Socialist Calculation Controversy as the Starting Point of the Economics of Information

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Mirowski ◽  
Edward Nik-Khah
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Political Issue ◽  
Economics Of Information ◽  
History Of Economics ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Political Problem ◽  
Cowles Commission ◽  
History Of

The Socialist Calculation Controversy first raised the political problem of agent epistemology in the history of economics. The Cowles Commission, primarily comprising market socialists, sought to answer and refute Hayek and the neoliberals. The key point of contention was to determine what it meant for The Market to know something, which was unmistakably a political issue. This chapter lays the groundwork for the entrance of information considerations into neoclassical microeconomics.

scholarly journals The Road Network in the Longue Durée: A Reading Key of the History of Territories

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Magali Watteaux
Keyword(s):  
Road Network ◽  
Great Depth ◽  
Research Field ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
The Road ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Longue Duree ◽  
Longue Durée ◽  
Reading Key

AbstractThe historical study of routes has long remained confined to the great Roman roads, to the modern royal roads and to the medieval pilgrimage routes. For fifteen years, the French school of Archaeogeography has revisited this research field in great depth, following the first intuitions of the archaeologist Eric Vion. The innovative idea ‒ at least because it leads to a questioning of our methods ‒ is to consider the current road network as the starting point of the analysis. It is the true object of research for the historianarchaeologist because it represents a solid legacy whose logic one must unravel. Because this story is closely integrated with urban, political and economic matters, the study of this inherited road network represents a precious reading key to understanding the history of the territories in the longue durée. In the frame of this paper, we propose to recall these methodological advances and to present a case study in Brittany, around the small town of Chateaugiron. By this example, we want to show that the archaeogeographical analysis and interpretation offer a scientific narrative based on the paradigms of complexity and resilience to contemporary societies in charge of our territories.

scholarly journals Siting the New Economic Science: The Cowles Commission's Activity Analysis Conference of June 1949

2014 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 453-483 ◽  
Author(s):  
Till Düppe ◽  
E. Roy Weintraub
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Optimization Theory ◽  
Activity Analysis ◽  
Economic Science ◽  
Technical Standards ◽  
The Public ◽  
Or Economics ◽  
Cowles Commission ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Ideas

ArgumentIn the decades following World War II, the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics came to represent new technical standards that informed most advances in economic theory. The public emergence of this community was manifest at a conference held in June 1949 titled Activity Analysis of Production and Allocation. New ideas in optimization theory, linked to linear programming, developed from the conference's papers. The authors’ history of this event situates the Cowles Commission among the institutions of postwar science in-between National Laboratories and the supreme discipline of Cold War academia, mathematics. Although the conference created the conditions under which economics, as a discipline, would transform itself, the participants themselves had little concern for the intellectual battles that had defined prewar university economics departments. The authors argue that the conference signaled the birth of a new intellectual culture in economic science based on shared scientific norms and techniques un-interrogated by conflicting notions of the meaning of either science or economics.

The Road to the Baccalaureate

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 420-442
Author(s):  
Dina Ghazzawi ◽  
Lyle McKinney ◽  
Catherine Lynn Horn ◽  
Vincent Carales ◽  
Andrea Burridge
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Academic Preparedness ◽  
African Students ◽  
Bachelor Degree ◽  
Caribbean Students ◽  
The Road ◽  
Community College District ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Delayed Enrollment ◽  
Sub Saharan

International students are increasingly enrolling in U.S community colleges as a starting point to their higher education. However, limited research examines the factors contributing to their successful transfer to a 4-year institution and bachelor degree attainment. Utilizing longitudinal transcript data from a large community college district in Texas, this study uses hierarchical logistical regression to compare college experiences and transfer outcomes based on region of origin. Findings demonstrate that while Sub-Saharan African students have a significantly higher probability of transfer than Asian and Latin American students, the majority of bachelor degree recipients were Asian students graduating in STEM fields. Delayed enrollment into college and academic preparedness in math were negatively associated with transfer for Latin American and Caribbean students.

The Modernities of H. Lawrence Freeman

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 719-779
Author(s):  
David Gutkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
White Press ◽  
Grand Opera

H. Lawrence Freeman's “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” Voodoo, was premiered in 1928 in Manhattan's Broadway district. Its reception bespoke competing, racially charged values that underpinned the idea of the “modern” in the 1920s. The white press critiqued the opera for its allegedly anxiety-ridden indebtedness to nineteenth-century European conventions, while the black press hailed it as the pathbreaking work of a “pioneer composer.” Taking the reception history of Voodoo as a starting point, this article shows how Freeman's lifelong project, the creation of what he would call “Negro Grand Opera,” mediated between disparate and sometimes apparently irreconcilable figurations of the modern that spanned the late nineteenth century through the interwar years: Wagnerism, uplift ideology, primitivism, and popular music (including, but not limited to, jazz). I focus on Freeman's inheritance of a worldview that could be called progressivist, evolutionist, or, to borrow a term from Wilson Moses, civilizationist. I then trace the complex relationship between this mode of imagining modernity and subsequent versions of modernism that Freeman engaged with during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through readings of Freeman's aesthetic manifestos and his stylistically syncretic musical corpus I show how ideas about race inflected the process by which the qualitatively modern slips out of joint with temporal modernity. The most substantial musical analysis examines leitmotivic transformations that play out across Freeman's jazz opera American Romance (1924–29): lions become subways; Mississippi becomes New York; and jazz, like modernity itself, keeps metamorphosing. A concluding section considers a broader set of questions concerning the historiography of modernism and modernity.

An Introduction to Nonlinear Chemical Dynamics

1998 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irving R. Epstein ◽  
John A. Pojman
Keyword(s):  
Flow Reactor ◽  
Chemical Dynamics ◽  
Design Data ◽  
Chemical Oscillators ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Hands On ◽  
Undergraduate Laboratory ◽  
History Of ◽  
Mechanistic Basis ◽  
Nonlinear Chemical Dynamics

Just a few decades ago, chemical oscillations were thought to be exotic reactions of only theoretical interest. Now known to govern an array of physical and biological processes, including the regulation of the heart, these oscillations are being studied by a diverse group across the sciences. This book is the first introduction to nonlinear chemical dynamics written specifically for chemists. It covers oscillating reactions, chaos, and chemical pattern formation, and includes numerous practical suggestions on reactor design, data analysis, and computer simulations. Assuming only an undergraduate knowledge of chemistry, the book is an ideal starting point for research in the field. The book begins with a brief history of nonlinear chemical dynamics and a review of the basic mathematics and chemistry. The authors then provide an extensive overview of nonlinear dynamics, starting with the flow reactor and moving on to a detailed discussion of chemical oscillators. Throughout the authors emphasize the chemical mechanistic basis for self-organization. The overview is followed by a series of chapters on more advanced topics, including complex oscillations, biological systems, polymers, interactions between fields and waves, and Turing patterns. Underscoring the hands-on nature of the material, the book concludes with a series of classroom-tested demonstrations and experiments appropriate for an undergraduate laboratory.

On the Road to Vienna

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kai Bruns
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Law ◽  
The Road ◽  
Progressive Development ◽  
History Of ◽  
On The Road ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
International Law Commission ◽  
Law Commission

This chapter focuses on the negotiations that preceded the 1961 Vienna Conference (which led to the conclusion of the VCDR). The author challenges the view that the successful codification was an obvious step and refers in this regard to a history of intense negotiation which spanned fifteen years. With particular reference to the International Law Commission (ILC), the chapter explores the difficult task faced by ILC members to strike a balance between the codification of existing practice and progressive development of diplomatic law. It reaches the finding that the ILC negotiations were crucial for the success of the Conference, but notes also that certain States supported a less-binding form of codification. The chapter also underlines the fact that many issues that had caused friction between the Cold War parties were settled during the preparatory meetings and remained largely untouched during the 1961 negotiations.

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