Liberal parentalism

What normative constraints should bind parents (or policy makers) if they intervene in the choices of children (or constituencies) whose preferences evolve over time? For a sophisticated child who anticipates correctly his preference change, we prove that generically there exist parental interventions that are Pareto improving over the backward induction path that the child will follow on his own. If, in contrast, the child misperceives his future preferences, Pareto improving interventions might not exist, and even nudges might be painfully sobering. The parent may then choose to minimize the maximal disappointment along time that her benevolent intervention would cause.     

On the Strong Liberal State: Beyond Berghahn and Young

The paper is a reply to Berghahn and Young's reflections on Bonefeld's ‘Freedom and the Strong State’. It argues that ordoliberalism focuses on the strong state as the political form of free economy.     

Conservative belief and rationality

Playersʼ beliefs may be incompatible, in the sense that player i can assign probability 1 to an event E to which player j assigns probability 0. One way to block incompatibility is to assume a common prior. We consider here a different approach: we require playersʼ beliefs to be conservative, in the sense that all players must ascribe the actual world positive probability. We show that common conservative belief of rationality (CCBR) characterizes strategies in the support of a subjective correlated equilibrium where all playersʼ beliefs have common support. We also define a notion of strong rationalizability, and show that it is characterized by CCBR.     

Liberal Jansenists and interest-bearing loans in eighteenth-century France: a reappraisal

Abstract

This article is an attempt to prove that although the liberal Jansenists – Jansenism being the most powerful Christian protest movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – were not the first and the only ones to address the prohibition of interest-bearing loans, their writings on the issue shifted and fuelled the debate during the French Enlightenment, especially among the Encyclopédistes and the economists. By refuting the very logic of “extrinsic titles” of the Scholastics and their extension later on by the Jesuits, the liberals Jansenists redefined “interest” as the price to be paid for the use of money.     

施特劳斯谈自由教育

本文介绍了施特劳斯关于自由教育的论述。施特劳斯将文化作为自由教育得以实施的条件和最终达到的目标,并且认为自由教育与现代民主制相辅相成,现代民主制保证了公民受教育的权利,而现代民主制之产生和运行也需要自由教育。自由教育必须研读经典。     

The case of Hungary: Liberal socialism under stress

This paper analyzes the response to the increase in world oil prices since 1973 in the Hungarian economy-dependent on foreign trade, poorly endowed with energy resources, closely tied to the USSR, and possessing the most “liberal” of the East European economic reforms. Hungary has stepped up domestic energy production and shifted the structure of energy use from oil to coal. But it has also laid plans for additional energy imports at world prices (including those from the USSR). The energy crisis did not cause Hungary to abandon its economic reform; in fact, recent developments suggest that the reform is going ahead.     

Contractarianism as Liberal Conservatism: Buchanan's Unfinished Philosophical Agenda

This paper distinguishes several types of contractarianism. It argues that Buchanan type contractarianism may be classified as a specific formal type of conservatism that grants normative status to the status quo. How such conservative contractarianism relates to and possibly blends into classical liberalism is sketched and it is suggested that classical liberal ideals along with a specific form of conservatism rather than the idea of a contract per se should be seen as the core of Buchanan type contractarianism.     

Liberal constitutionalism,constitutional liberalism and democracy

The tension that is often seen to exist between the ideals of liberalism and of democracy is examined in this paper in light of the distinction between two liberal outlooks at constitutional regimes, namely, on the one side, a liberal constitutionalism that focuses on the need to provide institutional safeguards of individual liberty as private autonomy and, on the other hand, a constitutional liberalism that focuses on the need to respect the freedom of individuals to choose the constitutional environment in which they wish to live. It is argued that a liberalism that consistently extends its fundamental ideal of individual sovereignty to the level of constitutional choice can be reconciled with the basic democratic ideal of citizen sovereignty.     

社会学的历史转向

连接“过去”与“现在”之间的,是只此一次发生的过程、事件和各种历史现象。但是,是哪些因素造成了这“只此一次的历史”?当社会学家提出这样的问题,并不厌其烦地去揭示各种限制条件的时侯,他们实际上正在将历史过程中所丧失的各种可能性展现出来。历史取向的社会学研究因此具有很强的批判性,它从理论上恢复了在历史过程的各个时点上存在过、但却最终丧失了的各种可能性,由此而质疑现实的合理性。     

F. A. Hayek: The Liberal as Communitarian

At the heart of Friedrich A. Hayek's social philosophy is a regard for the socially-constituted nature of man: the individual is not taken to be asocial or pre-social, but rather it is recognized that society defines the individual. The neglect of this aspect of Hayek's work by both liberal and communitarian, as well as libertarian, writers within political philosophy has led to his position being misrepresented, for Hayek's brand of liberalism is more akin to one variant of modern communitarianism than it is to the libertarian strain of liberal thought.     

Taxation in the Liberal Tradition

The Review of Austrian Economics - In this essay, we argue that liberal economists should take more seriously the problems of public goods and externalities as well as the capacity of taxation and...     

How to Turn an Industry Green: Taxes versus Subsidies

Environmental policies frequently target the ratio of dirty to green output within the same industry. To achieve such targets, the green sector may be subsidized or the dirty sector be taxed. We show that in a monopolistic competition setting, the two policy approaches have different welfare effects, depending on the design of the instrument (ad valorem versus unit instrument) and the initial situation (size of the dirty sector). For a strong green policy (a severe reduction of the dirty sector) a tax is the dominant instrument. If initially the dirty sector is important, then for moderate policy targets a subsidy may be the superior tool. These findings have implications for policies such as the Californian Zero Emission Bill.This paper benefited from the comments of Wilhelm Althammer, Michael Kohlhaas, Michael Pflüger, Thomas Ziesemer, participants at the EEA Annual Congress 2003, Stockholm, at the WEAI Annual Conference 2004, Vancouver, and two anonymous referees. The authors are responsible for any remaining errors.     

企业危机管理之路:如何将危机演变成商机

企业危机同人们的生老病死一样是不可避免的。因此,企业应该有效地进行危机管理,使危机转化为机遇。本文首先分析了危机和危机管理理论,然后通过企业在经营过程中出现的危机事件,归纳出企业危机管理失败的原因,最后对于企业应如何规避风险,成功将危机转化为机遇提出了一些启示,主要包括:树立危机意识,建立危机预警、监控机制,防范于未然,快速反应,防止危机蔓延,尊重事实,主动承担责任,注重运用媒体、网络的力量化危为机等。     

Colonialism,Postcolonialism and the Liberal Welfare State

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the colonial and racial origins of the welfare state with a particular emphasis on the liberal welfare state of the USA and UK. Both are understood in terms of the centrality of the commodified status of labour power expressing a logic of market relations. In contrast, we argue that with a proper understanding of the relations of capitalism and colonialism, the sale of labour power as a commodity already represents a movement away from the commodified form of labour represented by enslavement. European colonialism is integral to the development of welfare states and their forms of inclusion and exclusion which remain racialised through into the twenty-first century.     

折返线区间群洞效应分析与施工优化

针对北京地铁5号线折返线区间典型断面群洞效应进行有限元分析，比较了不同开挖情况下洞室的有效应力和地面沉降，得出较为合理和快捷可行的施工方案。     

Regular Distributive Efficiency and the Distributive Liberal Social Contract

We consider abstract social systems of private property, made of n individuals endowed with nonpaternalistic interdependent preferences, who interact through exchanges on competitive markets and Pareto‐improving lump‐sum transfers. The transfers follow from a distributive liberal social contract defined as a redistribution of initial endowments such that the resulting market equilibrium allocation is both: (i) a distributive optimum (i.e., is Pareto‐efficient relative to individual interdependent preferences) and (ii) unanimously weakly preferred to the initial market equilibrium. We elicit minimal conditions for meaningful social contract redistribution in this setup, namely, the weighted sums of individual interdependent utility functions, built from arbitrary positive weights, have suitable properties of nonsatiation and inequality aversion; individuals have diverging views on redistribution, in some suitable sense, at (inclusive) distributive optima; and the initial market equilibrium is not a distributive optimum. We show that the relative interior of the set of social contract allocations is then a simply connected smooth manifold of dimension n ? 1. We also show that the distributive liberal social contract rules out transfer paradoxes in Arrow–Debreu social systems. We show, finally, that the liberal social contract yields a norm of collective action for the optimal provision of any pure public good.