Social ecology,sustainability, and economics

What mode of analysis might be employed, that captures the confluent action of material and social systems acting together? The framework of Social Ecology, which first emerged as a rejoinder to the Chicago School of Human Ecology of the early 1900s, evolved over subsequent decades as an attempt at such integration. We revisit social ecology's historical origins and foundational assumptions. We propose that the social ecological framework can offer useful conceptual grounding to scholars of ecological economics. We illustrate how this analytical lens affords a deeper understanding of unsustainable systems and valuation problems.     

Social morality and the primacy of individual perspectives

This paper examines themes and concerns about my book, The Order of Public Reason, raised in the three essays in this symposium by Peter Boettke & Rosolino Candela, Michael Munger and Kevin Vallier. The three essays present variations on a common theme: I need to embrace deeper commitments than The Order of Public Reason acknowledges. In my estimation these proposals lead to places that I do not wish to go — nor should anyone devoted to core Hayekian insights. The goal of the book is show how a diversity of moral views can lead to a cooperative social morality while abjuring as far as possible “external” moral claims — claims that do not derive from the perspectives of cooperating individuals. The diverse individual moral perspectives, and what they understand as normative, must be the real engines of social normativity. In this essay I stress the primacy of the individual normative perspectives in generating social morality; this helps show why the urge to embrace deeper commitments should be resisted. Rather than going over the presentation in The Order of Public Reason to stress this point, I sketch a modest recasting of the analysis in terms of models of individual moral interaction.     

Money,inflation, and maximizing behavior: The case of many countries

This paper examines a world which is composed of countries each inhabited by a population of farsighted overlapping generations and in which the only assets are the national currencies that grow at constant proportional rates. It is shown that the world economy is unstable in the sense that, away from the steady state, either the real value of each country's stock of money goes to zero or the world monetary system eventually collapses. It is also shown that the dynamic paths of the price level and the real stock of money in each country may move nonmonotonically over time.     

Trade policy and ecology

Trade sanctions on product exports are often used as measures for conservation of stocks of living resources. Two opposing approaches are investigated. The harvest approach argues that sanctions reduce the harvest, and thus protects the stock. It is shown that this does not consider the long run effects nor the effects of sanctions on the management system. The investment approach argues that increased price protects the stock, making the species a profitable investment. It is shown that this approach does not consider the asset effects of price changes, and that the sanctions usually increase the stock in an one species analysis. If the wildlife competes for land the conclusions may be different, but still sanctions usually works. If the manager has a joint management of several species, the stock effects of sanctions are ambiguous, depending on both the species interaction, and the profitability of the harvesting from each of them. In this case it is not possible to use intuitive reasoning, sanctions give distortions to all stocks simultaneously. The threat of extinction depends crucially on the unit cost in harvesting of depleted stocks. The paper concludes that trade policy is a too general measure for the management of living resources, and may implicate important economic distortions to the ecological system.This study is partially funded by the Research Council of Norway (Environment and Development). I thank Derek Clark, Tore Thonstad, Frode Steen and two anonymous referees for helpful comments.     

The evolution of morality and the end of economic man

1871 saw the publication of two major treatises in economics, with self-seeking economic man at their center. In the same year Darwin published The Descent of Man, which emphasized sympathy and cooperation as well as self-interest, and contained a powerful argument that morality has evolved in humans by natural selection. Essentially this stance is supported by modern research. This paper considers the nature of morality and how it has evolved. It reconciles Darwin’s notion that a developed morality requires language and deliberation (and is thus unique to humans), with his other view that moral feelings have a long-evolved and biologically-inherited basis. The social role of morality and its difference with altruism is illustrated by an agent-based simulation. The fact that humans combine both moral and selfish dispositions has major implications for the social sciences and obliges us to abandon the pre-eminent notion of selfish economic man. Economic policy must take account of our moral nature.     

Empirical factor abundance with many factors and countries

Factor abundance is a two-dimensional concept that is awkward for data with numerous factors of production and many countries. The present paper introduces and utilizes a high-dimensional measure of factor abundance, the Euclidean distance to the intersection of an endowment ray with the unit hyperplane. Standard factor abundance is a special case of this distance abundance measure. Using a familiar data set, distance abundance outperforms share and world abundance in predicting factor content.     

Parameter orthogonalization and Bayesian inference with many instruments

It is examined how Bayesian inference might proceed in models with many instruments. A new prior specification based on Lancaster’s (1997) parameter orthogonalization is developed. This orthogonalization is shown to guarantee that the statistical problems associated with the first stage coefficients are not carried over in estimating the parameter of interest.     

Technical progress,population growth and intergenerational equity in a model with many exhaustible and renewable resources

A condition ensuring intergenerational equity is derived using a neoclassical model of many exhaustible and renewable resources involving technical progress and population growth.     

In search of an evolutionary edge: trading with a few, more, or many

Consider a population of farmers who live around a lake. Each farmer engages in trade with his m adjacent neighbors, where m is termed the “span of interaction.” Trade is governed by a prisoner’s dilemma “rule of engagement.” A farmer’s payoff is the sum of the payoffs from the m prisoner’s dilemma games played with his ^m/₂^m/_2 neighbors to the left, and with his ^m/₂^m/_2 neighbors to the right. When a farmer dies, his son takes over. The son who adheres to his father’s span of interaction decides whether to cooperate or defect by considering the actions taken and the payoffs received by the most prosperous member of the group comprising his father and his father’s m trading partners. Under a conventional structure of payoffs, it is shown that a large span of interaction is detrimental to the long-run coexistence of cooperation and defection, and conditions are provided under which the social outcome associated with the expansion of trade when individuals trade with a few is better than that when they trade with many. Under the stipulated conditions it is shown, by means of a static comparative analysis of the steady state configurations of the farmer population, that an expansion of the market can be beneficial in one context, detrimental in another.     

Equilibrium theory with asymmetric information and infinitely many states

Radner (Econometrica 36, 31–58 1968) proved existence of a competitive equilibrium for differential information economies with finitely many states. We extend this result to economies with infinitely many states of nature. Each agent observes a public and a private signal. The publicly observed signal may take infinitely many values but, in order to get existence, we assume that private signals only take finitely many values. Actually, there is no hope to get a general existence result since Podczeck et al. (Vienna University Working Papers 2008) already proposed non-existence results. We would like to thank a referee and the Associate Editor for valuable suggestions and remarks. The actual version of the paper has benefited from their comments. This work commenced while V.F. Martins-da-Rocha and P.K. Monteiro were visiting RGEA. Carlos Hervés Beloso acknowledges support from BEC2003-09067-C04-01 (Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología and FEDER) and PGIDT04XIC30001PN (Xunta de Galicia). V.F. Martins-da-Rocha acknowledges partial financial support from PRONEX. P.K. Monteiro acknowledges the financial support of CNPq/Edital Universal 02/2006.     

Growth with many agents and wages paid ex ante

In this paper, we consider a one-sector model of economic growth with several infinitely-lived heterogeneous agents, who are endowed with diverse discount factors as well as preferences over consumption. In line with the classical Ramsey model, agents are not allowed to borrow against future income. Unlike the traditional assumption of ex post wage payment, wages are paid ex ante in our model. We first explain the difference between the assumptions of wages being paid ex ante and wages being paid ex post in the framework of a simple illustrative two-class model. Our main result shows that in contrast to the many-agent Ramsey model with ex post wage payment, the capital stock sequence converges to the steady state stock irrespective of production technology employed by the firms. Further, all impatient agents own zero capital stock, whereas the most patient agent owns the entire capital stock from some time onward. Thus, we have shown that a slight modification in the timing of wage payment in growth models can lead to significant changes in the stability properties of equilibrium dynamics.     

电子商务时代会计职业道德问题及对策研究

建立以诚信为基础的市场经济是社会公众的共同愿望。会计从业人员职业道德水平的高低，是关系到国家财经法规制度能否贯彻执行、经济秩序能否维护、经济发展能否顺畅的大问题。随着我国市场经济不断深化，电子商务时代的发展，会计从业人员职业道德出现了一定偏差，严重影响了会计行业的发展，并引起了社会和政府广泛关注。针对现状笔者对会计职业道德失范原因进行了分析，研究了加强会计人员思想素质教育，提高会计职业道德建设的水平。     

Equilibrium theory with asymmetric information and with infinitely many commodities

The traditional deterministic general equilibrium theory with infinitely many commodities cannot cover economies with private information constraints on the consumption sets. We bring the level of asymmetric information equilibrium theory at par with that of the deterministic one. In particular, we establish results on equilibrium existence for exchange economies with asymmetric (differential) information and with an infinite dimensional commodity space. Our new equilibrium existence theorems include, as a special case, classical results, e.g. Bewley [Existence of equilibria in economies with infinitely many commodities, J. Econ. Theory 4 (1972) 514-540] or Mas-Colell [The price equilibrium existence problem in topological vector lattices, Econometrica 54 (1986) 1039-1053].     

电子商务时代会计职业道德问题及对策研究

建立以诚信为基础的市场经济是社会公众的共同愿望.会计从业人员职业道德水平的高低,是关系到国家财经法规制度能否贯彻执行、经济秩序能否维护、经济发展能否顺畅的大问题.随着我国市场经济不断深化,电子商务时代的发展,会计从业人员职业道德出现了一定偏差,严重影响了会计行业的发展,并引起了社会和政府广泛关注.针对现状笔者对会计职业道德失范原因进行了分析,研究了加强会计人员思想素质教育,提高会计职业道德建设的水平.