The Average Period of Production: History of an Idea

Author(s):  
Peter Lewin ◽  
Nicolas Cachanosky
2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Lewin ◽  
Nicolás Cachanosky

Austrian capital theory tried to capture the intuitive and basically undeniable importance that time plays in economic life, but arguably was diverted down a blind alley with Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk’s average period of production, a purely physical measure of ‘roundaboutness’—the length of the production process. For the general case, such a measure is a chimera. But the intuition is strong, and the idea survived and reappeared at various points in the history of capital theory. Almost unknown to economists, an alternative value measure of roundaboutness has existed at least since John Hicks’s formulation of his average period (AP) in 1939, which, coincidentally, was exactly the same measure discovered by the financial actuary Frederick Macaulay in 1938, called by him “Duration” (D). Macaulay’s D, more richly interpreted as Hicks’s AP, is a measure that more appropriately captures what it was that the Austrians struggled to express over many years in their capital theory and in their analysis of the business cycle.


This collection of essays, drawn from a three-year AHRC research project, provides a detailed context for the history of early cinema in Scotland from its inception in 1896 till the arrival of sound in the early 1930s. It details the movement from travelling fairground shows to the establishment of permanent cinemas, and from variety and live entertainment to the dominance of the feature film. It addresses the promotion of cinema as a socially ‘useful’ entertainment, and, distinctively, it considers the early development of cinema in small towns as well as in larger cities. Using local newspapers and other archive sources, it details the evolution and the diversity of the social experience of cinema, both for picture goers and for cinema staff. In production, it examines the early attempts to establish a feature film production sector, with a detailed production history of Rob Roy (United Films, 1911), and it records the importance, both for exhibition and for social history, of ‘local topicals’. It considers the popularity of Scotland as an imaginary location for European and American films, drawing their popularity from the international audience for writers such as Walter Scott and J.M. Barrie and the ubiquity of Scottish popular song. The book concludes with a consideration of the arrival of sound in Scittish cinemas. As an afterpiece, it offers an annotated filmography of Scottish-themed feature films from 1896 to 1927, drawing evidence from synopses and reviews in contemporary trade journals.


2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 496-517
Author(s):  
Ned Hercock

This essay examines the objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series (1934). It considers their primary property to be their hardness – many of them have distinctively uniform and impenetrable surfaces. This hardness and uniformity is contrasted with 19th century organicism (Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Ruskin). Taking my cue from Kirsten Blythe Painter I show how in their work with hard objects these poems participate within a wider cultural and philosophical turn towards hardness in the early twentieth century (Marcel Duchamp, Adolf Loos, Ludwig Wittgenstein and others). I describe the thinking these poems do with regard to industrialization and to human experience of a resolutely object world – I argue that the presentation of these objects bears witness to the production history of the type of objects which in this era are becoming preponderant in parts of the world. Finally, I suggest that the objects’ impenetrability offers a kind of anti-aesthetic relief: perception without conception. If ‘philosophy recognizes the Concept in everything’ it is still possible, these poems show, to experience resistance to this imperious process of conceptualization. Within thinking objects (poems) these are objects which do not think.


2012 ◽  
pp. 115-123
Author(s):  
Robert W. Dimand

In the two decades before World War I, Irving Fisher and his French contemporary Adolphe Landry presented and extended Boehm-Bawerk's theory capital and interest, although both of them criticized Boehm-Bawerk's concept of an average period of production. They analyzed each other's work on interest theory in books reviews and books. They both attempted to construct an operationally meaninful version of the quantity theory of money, with Fisher building explicitly on early studies by Landry and Pierre des Essars in France and by Edwin Kemmerer and David Kinley in the US.


2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-120
Author(s):  
Paul Moody

Verity Lambert's brief period as Director of Production at Thorn-EMI Screen Entertainment (TESE) was responsible for the in-house development of five films: Morons from Outer Space (1985), Restless Natives (1985), Dreamchild (1985), Link (1986) and Clockwise (1986), although she had left the company before the last three were released. There has been limited critical engagement with these productions and Lambert's tenure in general, with the existing literature on this material tending to emphasise the eclectic nature of what were to be TESE's last releases before the company's sale to Cannon ( Hill 1999 ; Moody 2018 ; Park 1990 ; Walker 1985 ; Walker 2004 ; Wickham and Mettler 2005 ). Drawing on a series of detailed interviews with former TESE Production Executive, Graham Easton, along with previously unreleased archival documents from the Film Finances archive, this article develops a more detailed textual analysis and production history of these releases, in order more clearly to map TESE's complexities during this period. By engaging more coherently with the themes and aesthetics of TESE's output, the article argues that there is a consistency to Lambert's productions which can be seen at both a thematic and a stylistic level, centred on notions of constraint and obstacles to communication, and that this was nurtured by the environment created by Lambert and the Film Finances completion bond for each film.


10.1144/m52 ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. NP.1-NP

Geological Society Memoir 52 records the extraordinary journey of more than 50 years that has led to the development of some 458 oil and gas fields on the UK Continental Shelf (UKCS). It contains papers on almost 150 onshore and offshore fields in all of the UK's main petroliferous basins. These papers range from look-backs on some of the first-developed gas fields in the Southern North Sea, to papers on fields that have only just been brought into production or may still remain undeveloped, and includes two candidate CO2 sequestration projects.These papers are intended to provide a consistent summary of the exploration, appraisal, development and production history of each field, leading to the current subsurface understanding which is described in greater detail. As such, the Memoir will be an enduring reference source for those exploring for, developing, producing hydrocarbons and sequestering CO2 on the UKCS in the coming decades. It encapsulates the petroleum industry's deep subsurface knowledge accrued over more than 50 years of exploration and production.


Antiquity ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 92 (361) ◽  
Author(s):  
Achim Lichtenberger ◽  
Kimberlee S. Moran

Analysis of oil lamps and clay figurines recovered from a Late Roman ceramics workshop at Beit Nattif in Israel has revealed numerous fragments with evidence of the manufacturer's fingerprints preserved on some of the ceramic surfaces. Further study of these fingerprints has provided a unique insight into the production history of the workshop, even showing how particular innovations in technique may be associated with particular individuals.


Author(s):  
Brian Neve

This chapter revisits and explores the production history of director King Vidor’s independently made movie, Our Daily Bread (1934), its ideological and aesthetic motifs, and its exhibition and reception in the United States and beyond, not least its apparent failure at the box office. It further considers the relationship between the film and contemporary advocacy of cooperative activity as a response to the Great Depression, notably by the California Cooperative League, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, and Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty in California campaign for the state governorship. It also assesses the movie in relation to Vidor’s own cooperative vision through its emphasis on individuals and community as a solution to the Great Depression and the significant absence of the state in this agency.


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