Metaphors for manufacturing: What could it be like to be a manufacturing system?

In the world of modern manufacturing, considerable emphasis is placed upon properties of manufacturing systems described by the terms “flexibility,” “complexity,” “reliability,” “self-repairing,” and so forth. To understand and deal with such properties, one needs a theoretical framework allowing one to pose and analyze various questions surrounding the meaning and interrelations of these terms. This paper addresses the questions of what sort of system-theoretic frameworks would be likely candidates to form the basis for such a theory of manufacturing.Our approach to the modeling problem is to examine several different paradigms that have proven useful in other fields—engineering, biology, linguistics, computer science, chemistry—and to explore the degree to which these “metaphors” can be used to characterize manufacturing systems. The paper concludes with an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of each metaphor and a suggestion for a program devoted to further development of the most promising approaches.     

Alfred Thayer Mahan and American Geopolitics: The Conservatism and Realism of an Imperialist

Debate about the goals of American foreign policy at the end of the twentieth century, especially that thread differentiating “conservative” from “neoconservative” perspectives, might profit by revisiting the debate over American expansion at the end of the nineteenth century. “I am an imperialist,” Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan once remarked, “simply because I am not isolationist.” This paper explores the connection between Mahan's defense of imperialism-often couched in terms of national interest and balance of power- and the norms of American power in world politics. The will-to-power behind American expansion and involvement, a formidable pillar in Mahan's realism, coexisted (often uneasily) with the affirmation of national purpose, a less formidable but still important part of Mahan's idealism. Mahan's strong conservative inclinations in politics were matched by a willingness to employ the tools of realism-particularly traditional diplomatic methods-as a way to uphold historic national goals and moral vision in American foreign policy. Far from seeing an irremediable conflict between the counsels of realism and limited moral gains in foreign policy, Mahan understood that governments are not immune from certain overall constraints. Seldom if ever could American actions abroad be defended by arguing solely for the maintenance or increase of national power.     

国际“过度旅游”现象述评

“过度旅游”对可持续发展具有关键性的负向影响。人类旅行与旅游活动经历了一个漫长的发展过程,2000年前后,全球大多数国家和地区都已经或开始进入大众旅游时代。旅游发展的各种影响——经济的和非经济的、积极的和负面的——都在不断扩大。从总的趋势而言,当人类旅行与旅游活动人数规模、访问区域、增长速度和影响较小的时候,对旅游发展的反对声音多局限在特定地区、时段和人群,但随着旅游规模扩展与速度逐渐加快,“拥挤度”加大的情况下,反对的声音则越来越强烈,甚至开始从情绪上反对转变成社会行动。到21世纪第二个十年的后期,“过度旅游”开始变成一种“全球关注”,关注的群体由最初的旅游目的地居民扩展到学术界、国际旅游机构、旅游业界、国家政府相关机构以及各类媒体,旅游者本身也参与其中。这一关注在2018年形成高潮,“overtourism”正式被英国《牛津英语词典》选入当年的年度词汇。于是,国际社会越来越关注“过度旅游”现象,并以不同的方式确定其含义,评估其影响,探讨产生的原因和谋划应对策略与行动。尽管对“过度旅游”现象的认识还存在着很多分歧,政府、业界、社会乃至旅游者对待这一现象的态度大相径庭,但毕竟这一现象引起了全球的关注,因此,了解和研究这一现象,探讨其发展趋势,应当是旅游相关学术机构的责任。本文旨在为对“过度旅游”现象的来龙去脉做一个初步的梳理,以期推进我国学术界关注这个“全球关注”现象的研究,促进我国旅游业健康有序地发展。也许“过度旅游”在中国尚未成为严重问题,但未雨绸缪、防患于未然是非常必要的。更何况,在全球更加开放,全球化不断深化的国际背景下,一个遍及全球的问题,恐怕中国也很难独善其身。     

Transparency for governance: The mechanisms and effectiveness of disclosure-based and education-based transparency policies

When transparency is used as a tool for global environmental governance - i.e., to induce targeted actors to reduce environmentally-harmful behaviors, it can operate via disclosure or education. Disclosure-based policies improve the information the public has about targeted actors' behaviors while education-based policies improve the information targeted actors have about their own behaviors, whether that is information about consequences, alternatives, or social norms. Various social and political forces shape whether and what type of transparency policies are adopted. Disclosure-based and education-based transparency policies are effective under different conditions and operate through different mechanisms. Both often operate through mechanisms that reflect an instrumental logic of consequences but also can and do operate through mechanisms that reflect a normative logic of appropriateness, by increasing the legitimacy accorded to global environmental norms and the social accountability targeted actors feel regarding their behaviors. Understanding the differences in the mechanisms by which disclosure-based and education-based transparency policies operate suggests that both scholars and practitioners should use caution in understanding why, and predicting when, such policies will work.     

State capitalism and the rent-seeking conjecture

The notion that state capitalism (an economic system “in which the state functions as the leading economic actor and uses markets primarily for political gain”) is a new form of capitalism emerging in the global arena has been recently advanced by several authors. This paper explores the problem of the nature of this system in the light of these claims to novelty. What are its main features as described by these authors? Is state capitalism distinctive from other forms of capitalism or other types of economic systems? Are we really witnessing the emergence of a new type of economic system? To address such questions the paper starts by trying to place the model of state capitalism within the traditional comparative economic systems framework. The inconclusive result leads to a different approach in which the concept of rent-seeking society is used to underlie the structural similarities between mercantilism, real life socialism and state capitalism. The article argues that the conjecture that what has been labeled “state capitalism” is yet another form of rent-seeking system is both robust and worth further investigating.     

Post-Crisis Experiments in Development Finance Architectures: A Hirschmanian Perspective On ‘Productive Incoherence’

Abstract

The Asian and especially the global crisis of 2008 have catalyzed decentralization of the developing world’s financial governance architecture. I understand this state of affairs via the concept of “productive incoherence” which is apparent in a denser, multilayered development financial architecture that is emerging as a consequence of heterogeneous practical adjustments to changing circumstances rather than as the embodiment of a coherent doctrine. Drawing on Albert Hirschman, I argue that the absence of an encompassing theoretical blueprint for a new economic system—i.e. a new “ism” to replace neoliberalism—is in fact a vitally important virtue. If we cannot live without a new “ism,” I propose “Hirschmanian Possibilism” as a new doctrine—one that rejects an overarching theoretical framework from which to deduce the singly appropriate institutional structure of the economy. Hirschmanian Possibilism asserts instead the value of productive incoherence as a framework for pursuing democratic, ethically viable development institutions.     

日本马克思主义经济学与现实问题研究态势

笔者主要以2003年日本经济理论学会第51届大会的论文为依据，先描述其马克思主义经济学研究的若干特点与态势，然后综述关于社会经济学和规范理论，全球化和元理论，资本主义是否能够存在下去，是资本主义控制市场还是市场控制资本主义，全球一体化和国际金融体系的不稳定化，全球经济一体化进程与阻碍，以及银行衰退论和市场原教旨主义金融行政等具体问题的理论观点。     

Limits and possibilities of large-scale long-range societal models

It is argued that the appropriate criteria for evaluating large-scale long-range societal (or “world”) models differ significantly from the criteria that are appropriate for short-range econometric models or for small “toy” models. World models are designed to elucidate major societal problems arising from the interaction of many loosely connected factors—demographic, economic, technological, and environmental—that can be safely neglected in short-range extrapolative models. World models are also intended to explore the implications of long-range policy alternatives. Consequently, it is important that world models be phenomenological, rather than statistical, and they must “capture” the essence of some inherently nonlinear phenomena. This implies achieving qualitative realism without imposing an unwarranted assumption of causal determinism. Unfortunately, the mathematical characteristics of large nonlinear systems may essentially preclude meaningful long-run forecasts.     

The value of information about central bankers' preferences

I study the value to society of information about central bankers' preferences for inflation relative to output stabilization. I find that the value to society of information is only positive if bankers are “very” conservative. The reason is the following. More information has two effects. On the one hand it allows the public to make more accurate predictions, reducing surprise inflation and consequently the expected variance of output; on the other hand, information increases the expected variability of inflation. The latter effect dominates the former when bankers are not “sufficiently” conservative.     

A proposal for more sophisticated normative principles in introductory economics

Introductory textbooks teach a simple normative story about the importance of maximizing economic surplus that supports common policy claims. There is little defense of the claim that maximizing surplus is normatively important, which is not obvious to non-economists. Difficulties with the claim that society should maximize surplus are generally not addressed. Economists are thus frequently criticized by non-economists for having a poor moral foundation for our normative claims. We should tell a more sophisticated normative story that justifies the moral importance of surplus, but acknowledges that other moral values may conflict with generating surplus and that distribution is not always separable from efficiency. This would allow students to make more compelling arguments in favor of normative positions they accept, regardless of the values they hold.     

Toward Generalized Evolutionism: Beyond “Generalized Darwinism” and Its Critics

This article seeks to transcend the debate regarding “generalized Darwinism” or “universal Darwinism” for the social sciences. Highlighting recent discoveries in evolutionary biology, the article argues that it is no longer tenable to insist that (neo-)Darwinism is the only proper doctrine for understanding biological evolution. Moreover, social evolution is much more than purely (neo-)Darwinian or (neo-)Lamarckian. As such, the debate on whether we deploy only (neo-)Darwinism or (neo-)Lamarckism — generalized or not — to understand social evolution is a red herring. Instead, social scientists should embrace “generalized evolutionism,” a more accommodating and versatile doctrine that subsumes “(generalized) Darwinism” or “(generalized) Lamarckism.” Empirical inquiries that deploy “generalized evolutionism” have shed important new light on some critical puzzles in human society: from institutional change to the foundation of economic development before 1500 AD, through the coming of the industrial revolution, to the evolution of the international system. More empirical efforts along this line of theorizing are needed.     

Social memory,evidence, and conflict

This paper examines an equilibrium model of social memory — a society's vicarious beliefs about its past. We show that incorrect social memory is a key ingredient in creating and perpetuating destructive conflicts.We analyze an infinite-horizon model in which two countries face off each period in a game of conflict characterized by the possibility of mutually destructive “all out war” that yields catastrophic consequences for both sides. Each country is inhabited by a dynastic sequence of individuals. Each individual cares about future individuals in the same country, and can communicate with the next generation of their countrymen using private messages. Social memory is based on these messages, and on physical evidence — a sequence of imperfectly informative public signals of past behavior. We find that if the future is sufficiently important for all individuals, then regardless of the precision of physical evidence from the past there is an equilibrium in which the two countries engage in all out war with arbitrarily high frequency, an outcome that cannot arise in the standard repeated game. In our construction, each new generation “repeats the mistakes” of its predecessors, leading to an endless cycle of destructive behavior.Surprisingly, we find that degrading the quality of information that individuals have about current decisions may “improve” social memory. This in turn ensures that arbitrarily frequent all out wars cannot occur.     

Existence of valuation equilibria when equilibrium strategies cannot differentiate between equal ties

This paper reconsiders the valuation equilibrium concept (Jehiel and Samet, 2007) and proposes an additional regularity condition concerning the players? equilibrium strategies. The condition, which requires equilibrium strategies to induce the same local behaviour at all nodes with “similar” optimal actions, increases both the predictive power and the internal consistency of the concept — especially when used as a tool to study boundedly rational behaviour in games with imperfect information and/or imperfect recall. It is shown not to conflict with existence.     

The importance of bioeconomic feedback in invasive species management

Invasive species can pose significant risks to society. Managing invasive risks cost-effectively would likely benefit from an integrated bioeconomic framework that accounts for the feedback links between the biological and economic systems. Modeling these feedbacks can be challenging relative to the standard “damage function” approach in which the parameters from one system are added to a model of the other, without any feedback. Given time constraints, the open question is whether the effort to capture feedback links is worthwhile and provides more useful information than not integrating. Herein, we use as our foil the case of zebra mussels in a Midwestern Lake. We consider responses from the removal of two forms of feedback: the loop between the firm and the biological system, and a loop between the manager and a firm. Our results suggest accounting for feedbacks can matter—but not in every dimension.     

Empowerment and intimate partner violence: Domestic abuse when household income is uncertain

Intimate partner violence is an important global health problem that remains ill understood. Several studies have documented that female empowerment may increase violence against women—the so‐called “male backlash.” We propose a utilitarian explanation for this phenomenon, based on the assumption that violence may be used as an instrument to affect the distribution of the household surplus between the spouses. Our main result is that promoting norms of gender equity (or otherwise enhancing the prospects of divorced women) may inadvertently promote violence against women in settings where production outcomes are uncertain.     

Current global imbalances and the Keynes Plan: A Keynesian approach for reforming the international monetary system

This paper proposes a “logical experiment”, illustrating how alternative international monetary systems may produce opposite results in the global economy. In the current organisation, “key currencies” work as international money. Keynes, by contrast, proposed that this role should be assigned to a supranational, “credit” money. While the world currently lives in an asymmetric regime, which lead to what has been defined as a “balance of financial terror”, Keynes tried to achieve a more peaceful type of “international balance”. I argue that the structural reform and the technical provisions proposed by the “Keynes Plan” may still – at least in principle – provide useful remedies for international disequilibria, by remedying the asymmetries of the current international payments architecture and helping to curb both inflationary and deflationary pressures on the world economy.     

Improving the industrial anticipation of current scientific activity

There is now widespread realization that new scientific findings are the foundations of much of tomorrow's technical and economic growth. How might one shorten awareness of scientific progress and possible applications? Several concepts are suggested—a) speculations of scientists involved, b) analysis of current government funding of research projects (per Klingman), c) retrospective analysis of the evolution of a scientific field to identify precedent influential factors, d) normative forecasts of scientists reviewing their field (“what could be”), e) normative forecasts of scientists seeking support for new work (“what should be”), and f) analysis of current “artifacts” of science. It is argued that vigorous study along these lines could speed some industrial and governmental response to ongoing work on scientific frontiers.     

We start from here

As James Buchanan often asserted, in constitutional design “we start from here” which is to say we design a constitution to fit the institutions, social practices and so forth that we already have. Comparison of the complicated case of the US constitution and the failed attempt at constitutionalism in contemporary Egypt suggest that many societies are not yet ready for serious constitutional design. The English civil wars were about religion; the US constitution ignores religion and thereby avoids the grim conflict of church and state.     

关于低碳经济法律体系的研究

十八大报告中指出,中国应"着力推进绿色发展、循环发展、低碳发展"。在全球气候日益变暖、雾霾天气日益恶化的情况下,关于低碳经济法律体系的研究,有重要的现实意义。开发利用"低碳能源"、发展"低碳经济"、建设"低碳社会"是世界各国能源和经济的发展方向。我国建设低碳经济尚处在起步阶段,在促进低碳经济发展的政策法律体系方面仍处于薄弱的状态,在建设低碳经济过程中,我国应当构建一套完整的法律体系,以确保其健康发展。基于此,从低碳经济多角度对低碳经济法律体系的构建进行了论述。