解放和发展生产力是构建和谐社会的物质基础

解放和发展生产力是构建和谐社会的物质基础。注重发展社会生产力是马克思主义的根本观点,中国共产党对马克思生产力理论做出了重大贡献。解放和发展生产力与构建和谐社会辩证统一,解放和发展生产力是构建和谐社会的途径,改革为构建和谐社会提供动力支持,以人为本是构建社会主义和谐社会的根本出发点和落脚点,精神生产力是推动文明社会和谐发展的核心动力。     

评《社会治理、科技支撑与法治创新》

正《社会治理、科技支撑与法治创新》(朱庄瑞、解永照主编,中国政法大学出版社出版)探讨了新形势下和谐社会构建、社会治理优化、法治建设和科技支撑体系建设。该书从和谐社会建设的内涵、要求与目标出发,深入分析和谐社会构建和社会治理实践中的科技需求,和谐社会建设中的科技支撑,以及法治创新在科技支撑下如何维护社会稳定等,为科技创新支撑下的社会治理和法治建设提供参考建议。该书具有以下3个特点:     

生态生产力与我国现阶段的生产力发展

生态生产力作为一种先进的生产力形态,代表了当代生产力发展的基本方向。我国发展生态生产力既是落实科学发展观的现实要求,也是积极应对经济全球化的必然选择。我国发展生态生产力的目标指向是社会主义和谐社会的构建并最终实现自然(社会)与人的和谐发展。生态理念是发展生态生产力的理论先导,生态科技是发展生态生产力的物质基础,生态经济是发展生态生产力的具体模式,生态制度是发展生态生产力的现实保障。     

社会功能工资模型的构建

马克思经济学的劳动力价值工资理论、新古典经济学的边际生产力工资理论和利润分享工资理论等,在解释私有制经济中的劳动者报酬方面,都具有一定的优势,同时又都有一定的局限性。以劳动者报酬社会功能工资理论为标准,以马克思经济学的劳动力价值工资理论为起点,综合新古典经济学的边际生产力工资理论和利润分享工资理论,构建劳动者报酬社会功能工资模型,能为提高我国私有制经济中的劳动者报酬提供理论基础。     

文化生产力在生产力系统中的结构性转变

我国经济社会的快速发展,促进了人们文化需求层次的不断提高,使文化生产在整个社会生产中的地位和作用随之不断增强,文化产业在社会经济发展中的比重不断增大,从而引起了文化生产力在社会生产力系统中的结构性转变。大力发展文化生产力是满足人们不断增长的高层次需求、进一步促进我国经济快速、健康发展和社会全面进步的必然要求,是贯彻落实科学发展观、构建社会主义和谐社会,实现中华民族伟大复兴的战略选择。     

论以科学发展观为指导推进高校体育事业协调发展

采用理论分析法，分析了构建社会主义和谐社会中高校体育服务社会的必要性。高校是具有特殊角色和功能的社会一员，高校体育也是体育大家庭中的一员，在构建社会主义和谐社会的进程中，高校体育服务社会会提升自身在人民群众中的良好形象，能满足人民群众日益增长的对身体健康的需要，能推动社会的和谐发展与稳定。高校应顺应时代的发展要求，实现自身的价值，在传播文化知识的同时，提高全民的身体素质，更好地发挥其作用。加快构建社会主义和谐社会的进程。     

论社会保障制度与社会和谐

社会保障制度是社会生产力发展到一定程度,在经济结构变化导致社会结构变化中形成的一种具有复合功能的社会稳定系统。只有充分认识社会保障在整个社会运行机制中所处的地位和功能,把握社会保障与社会和谐的正相关关系,才能把健全、完善社会保障制度和构建和谐社会有机统一起来。     

主导价值观选择下科技革命与构建和谐社会模式研究

科学技术作为第一生产力不仅决定社会经济发展水平,而且对促进人与自然、人与人、人与社会和谐发展具有越来越重要的作用.不同时代价值观取向决定了科技与社会发展的不同模式.从人类发展史来看,科技与社会发展形成四种不同模式.通过对模式研究,对构建和谐社会具有参考价值.     

浅谈民营企业在构建和谐社区中的作用

建设和谐社会,惠泽街道百姓,这充分体现了人民群众的根本利益和共同心愿;占企业总数99％、占生产总值60％的民营企业作为国民经济的重要组成部分、促进生产力发展的重要力量,其性质、地位和作用决定了在构建和谐社会中应发挥生力军的作用;同样,企业作为社会成员中的一个重要群体,在构建和谐社会中也负有重大责任和不可推托的义务。     

构建和谐社会 解放和发展生产力——构建和谐社会意义的另一种视觉

社会主义的本质与根本任务是解放生产力和发展生产力,而构建和谐社会是解放生产力、发展生产力的重要手段和途径。和谐社会形成了良性的相互作用和矛盾运动,形成了社会的整合力与协作力,实现了三大制度文明的有机统一,激发了社会创造活力,实现了人与自然合理的物质变换,从而解放和发展了生产力。     

Pleasure and belief in Hume's Decision Process

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to introduce explicitly pleasure and belief in what aims at being a Humean theory of decision, like the one developed in Diaye and Lapidus (2005a). Although we support the idea that Hume was in some way a hedonist – evidently different from Bentham's or Jevons' way – we lay emphasis less on continuity than on the specific kind of hedonism encountered in Hume's writings (chiefly the Treatise, the second Enquiry, the Dissertation, or some of his Essays). Such hedonism clearly contrasts to its standard modern inheritance, expressed by the relation between preferences and utility.

The reason for such a difference with the usual approach lies in the mental process that Hume puts to the fore in order to explain the way pleasure determines desires and volition. Whereas pleasure is primarily, in Hume's words, an impression of sensation, it takes place in the birth of passions as reflecting an idea of pleasure, whose “force and vivacity” is precisely a “belief”, transferred to the direct passions of desire or volition that come immediately before action. As a result, from a Humean point of view, “belief” deals with decision under risk or uncertainty, as well as with intertemporal decision and indiscrimination problems.

The latter are explored within a formal framework, and it is shown that the relation of pleasure is transformed by belief into a non-empty class of relations of desire, among which at least one is a preorder.     

Globalization,Neoliberalism and the attack on social security

Neoliberal political movements advocate privatization of public pension systems. Globalization imposes pressure on nations to conform to neoliberal policy views with respect to the design and structure of social insurance, including public pension systems. The paper begins with an investigation of the economic, ethical and ideological dimensions of the privatization debates in the U.S.; it argues that privatization advocates may be largely moved by ideology, since the other reasons advanced appear weak or unfounded. The second part discusses the history of Social Security, the purposes for its creation, and some of its economic effects. Differences between public and private pension systems are considered. A brief international comparison of some aspects of public pension system finance and benefit structures is presented. The final section considers the ethical, macroeconomic and distributional implications of privatization, prefunding and payroll tax funding, and argues for a pay as you go system financed with income taxes. In order to promote equity, economic security, community, and social cohesion, public pension systems should be universal in coverage. In order to reduce the inequality, income insecurity, and aged poverty generated by market economies, public pension systems ought to be progressive: benefit/contribution ratios should be inversely proportional to income, and progressive income taxes should finance the system. To promote economic growth, the systems should be financed on a pay-as-you-go basis, and should not be prefunded except for an emergency reserve. The fiscal policy recommendations partially depend upon the theory developed by Abba Lerner in the 1940s, and recently advanced by Wynne Godley and Randy Wray: Lerner's “principle of functional finance.”     

Interest on reserves and inflation

The payment of interest on reserves has been a common practice in inflationary economies. This policy may seem paradoxical since it involves returning part of the seigniorage, generated by the inflation process, with the intention to finance the fiscal deficit. This paper argues that the motivation for this policy can be captured by the discretionary regime, where the policymaker pays interest on reserves because he is concerned with the erosion of real liquidity by inflation, which is in part beyond his control. However, this policy is an unlikely outcome in the commitment regime, where the policymaker is in full control of inflation.     

Neurally reconstructing expected utility

While the concept of “expected utility” informs many theories of decision making, little is known about whether and how the human brain might compute this quantity. This article reviews a series of functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) experiments designed to localize brain regions that respond in anticipation of increasing amounts of monetary incentives. These studies collectively suggest that anticipation of increasing monetary gains activates a subcortical region of the ventral striatum in a magnitude-proportional manner. This ventral striatal activation is not evident during anticipation of losses. Actual gain outcomes instead activate a region of the mesial prefrontal cortex. During anticipation of gain, ventral striatal activation is accompanied by feelings characterized by increasing arousal and positive valence. These findings affirm the role of emotion in the anticipation of incentives, and may provide an initial step towards a neural reconstruction of expected utility.     

Duplication, Growth and ‘Total Return Economics’

Maintenance consumption is an expense recovered in product prices, yet also a source of taste satisfaction which must be exhausted, rather than reinvested, from the capital affording it. This riddle is solved in the duplication rules: the cost of maintenance consumption is recovered in pay and prices, but an equal flow is exhausted from the human capital of the worker earning the pay. The rules impact tradition in several ways. If output is defined in principle as value added, then it cannot also be described as consumption plus net investment without double-counting the maintenance consumption recovered in prices. Also rate of return in the stationary state is not zero, but is the rate sufficient to offset the exhaustion of individual human capital. The rules lead to new insights into economic return, and support an argument that all growth at the scale of closure is due to productivity gain rather than to thrift.     

John Stuart Mill's Theories of Wealth and Income Distribution

Although he was much influenced by David Ricardo when he wrote the classical part of his Principles , John Stuart Mill was not a Ricardian when he penned his theories of wealth and distribution. They are based on a triple foundation. First, a belief that economics is a moral discipline. Second a theory of custom-driven human behavior. Third, an empirically formed conviction that the institutions of state, education and business cooperate to structure the distribution of income. On the basis of these presuppositions, Mill formulated 1) an institutional theory of the formation of human and non-human wealth and 2) an even more institutional theory of distribution demonstrating how the aforementioned institutions malignantly skew the distribution of income to the advantage of the propertied classes and to the extreme disadvantage of the working class. As a social economist, Mill recommended institutional reforms designed to eradicate the poverty of the working class.     

Forecasting the price of gold

This article seeks to evaluate the appropriateness of a variety of existing forecasting techniques (17 methods) at providing accurate and statistically significant forecasts for gold price. We report the results from the nine most competitive techniques. Special consideration is given to the ability of these techniques to provide forecasts which outperforms the random walk (RW) as we noticed that certain multivariate models (which included prices of silver, platinum, palladium and rhodium, besides gold) were also unable to outperform the RW in this case. Interestingly, the results show that none of the forecasting techniques are able to outperform the RW at horizons of 1 and 9 steps ahead, and on average, the exponential smoothing model is seen providing the best forecasts in terms of the lowest root mean squared error over the 24-month forecasting horizons. Moreover, we find that the univariate models used in this article are able to outperform the Bayesian autoregression and Bayesian vector autoregressive models, with exponential smoothing reporting statistically significant results in comparison with the former models, and classical autoregressive and the vector autoregressive models in most cases.     

Simulating the Effect of Regulatory Systems in a Fishery, An Application to the French Driftnet Albacore Fleet

With a thin economic component, most bio-economic models of fisheries failto assess the effects of the regulation systems on firms. In order to analysethe short term consequences of different management schemes, a simulationmodel is applied to the French driftnet albacore fleet: licence allocation withdriftnet regulation, individual quotas, and individual transferable quotaswithout any input control. Vessel technology is estimated by using the datacollected, and groups of vessels are distinguished according to criteria ofperformance. We present the adjustment within firms and between groupsunder different scenarios (limited entry with and without driftnetregulation, individual quotas and individual transferable quotas allocation),and we compare their results in terms of quasi-rent value and otherindicators such as hake harvests or dolphin by-catches.     

Knowledge as a Path-Dependence Process

By following a new approach proposed by Cognitive and Neuroeconomics, this paper presents and extends that part of Hayek's theory concerning knowledge in path-dependent terms, and shows that this is a fertile theory, opening new lines of inquiry for contemporary economics. In his theory of knowledge Hayek shows that the dynamics of economic change is path-dependent, in a different and more profound way than in the rest of the path-dependent literature. This literature deals with an important controversy, which will be also discussed and its specific and original meaning will be highlighted. As it will emerge, knowledge as a path-dependent process is consistent with cognitive theories of perception and learning and it plays a more important role than is traditionally assumed. Path-dependence is in fact always present in the cognitive dimension of perception and in individual decision-making processes, as well as in the processes of organizational innovation, and even in the macro-dimension of institutional change. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.