Pirsig's ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’: Quality, reason and binary opposites

Robert Pirsig's celebrated novel has lost little of its impact after 30 plus years, and still speaks to us in the West and our highly technological society. None of the issues raised regarding our relation with technology have changed. As fits the schizophrenic pattern of the book, this article is arbitrarily divided into two disparate sections: the first covers some of the sources for the book and the range of critical views on the book. The second, a more speculative conclusion, drawing on a contradiction in Pirsig's text, looks forward to the books continuing relevance as we see the promise of a new dawn for computers: quantum computing. I am unsure of how to equate the forceful rhetoric against dualism, with the facile mystical acceptance of the Buddha residing in the circuits of a digital computer. This fracture in Pirsig's work becomes more visible when he talks of the Japanese term ‘mu’, meaning ‘no thing’. Binary computation is challenged by alternative logics to binary logic. I examine these issues along with the current definitions of Pirsig's quality. A future ‘definition’ of Pirsig's Quality could be the undecided state of a quantum computer (or quantum processes in the mind).     

Bankruptcy and firm finance

This paper analyzes how an enforcement mechanism that resembles a court affects firm finance. The court is described by two parameters that correspond to enforcement costs and the amount of creditor/debtor protection. We provide a theoretical and quantitative characterization of the effect of these enforcement parameters on the contract loan rate, the default probability and welfare. We analyze agents’ incentive to default and pursue bankruptcy and show that when the constraints that govern these decisions bind, the enforcement parameters can have a sharply non-linear effect on finance. We also compute the welfare losses of “poor institutions” and show that they are non-trivial. The results provide guidance on when models which abstract from enforcement provide good approximations and when they do not.      

An index of growth due to depreciation*

Abstract. While factors such as inflation, technological change and growth often have been discussed in connection with the adequacy of provisions for depreciation under a historical cost model, there is another dimension to the capital maintenance problem and it concerns the multiplier effect of depreciation. When an amount equal to depreciation is reinvested, a firm's productive capacity tends to increase. Reinvestment of depreciation also increases a firm's financial capital if book depreciation is more accelerated than economic depreciation. Based on a model developed by Ijiri (1967), this paper derives an index of this growth due to depreciation. The index estimates a bias in conventional depreciation methods that has been overlooked in the literature on the subject. This bias has implications for inflation accounting because if conventional depreciation methods have a built-in growth bias, adjustments for inflation may be a type of double counting. A second implication mentioned concerns the bias in accounting rates of return. Résumé. Bien que des facteurs tels l'inflation, les changements technologiques et la croissance ont souvent été examinés à propos de la pertinence des provisions pour dépréciation dans le cadre du modèle au coût historique, un autre aspect du problème de préservation du capital subsiste et il concerne l'effet multiplicateur de l'amortissement. Lorsqu'un montant égal à l'amortissement est réinvesti, la capacité d'exploitation de la firme a tendance à s'accroître. Le réinvestissement de l'amortissement fait aussi augmenter le capital de la firme si l'amortissement comptable est plus accéléré que la dépréciation économique. En se basant sur un modèle élaboré par Ijiri (1967), cet article dérive un indice de cette croissance attribuable à l'amortissement. L'indice estime un biais des méthodes traditionnelles, qui a été négligé dans les recherches consacrées au sujet. Ce biais a des implications en comptabilité des effets de l'inflation, car si les méthodes d'amortissement traditionnelles comportent implicitement ce biais de croissance, les redressements relatifs à l'inflation peuvent être assimilés à un double comptage. Une deuxième conséquence est signalée, soit le biais relatif aux taux de rendement comptable.     

THE EFFECT OF A SINKING FUND ON THE REOFFERING YIELDS OF NEW PUBLIC UTILITY BONDS

In this study, empirical tests are conducted to determine the impact of a sinking fund on reoffering yields of a sample of new public utility bonds sold between January 1977 and March 1982. The findings of the regression analysis are consistent with the hypotheses that the value of the sinking fund varies with the default risk of the issuer and with market expectations of future interest rate movements, and that the sinking fund improves the liquidity of a bond issue.     

Assessing the competitive power of a region

The paper explores theoretical approaches to estimating a region’s competitiveness and its underlying factors. The competitive power indicators of the economic complex of Mogilev oblast, Belarus, are analyzed and its regional competitiveness is estimated on the basis of statistical data.