A review of the FCC and AT&T positions

The author assesses the conflicting arguments put forward in the preceding ‘position’ articles by Wiley and deButts. He focuses on those points which he feels are unjustified or receive inadequate attention. These include the issues of subsidisation, possible market expansion, service substitution, the ‘threat’ to universal service, and possible ‘second-round’ effects. In summary, he considers possible aspects of the development of competition.     

The metropolitan hierarchy of occupations: An economic interpretation of central place theory

The usefulness of central place theory, as a general explanation of the spatial distribution of activities in a system of cities and of the spatial ordering of urban places within that system, clearly relies on economic phenomena. Christaller's original formulation of the theory was similarly economic in basis, yet economic phenomena have been ignored in subsequent empirical testing of the theory. These tests, chiefly by geographers, have relied on population size as the chief, if not sole, determinant. This paper demonstrates that an economic explanation is a necessary component of the general theory of central places. Moreover, explicit economic variables not only alter the ordering of activities based strictly on demographic size, but generally offer a more powerful explanation of ordering.     

The Perils of Base Money

Insecure linkage of ordinary money to fractional reserves of a distinct base money can sometimes endanger the smooth working of modern monetary systems. This danger applies most obviously to the analogous insecure pegging of domestic to foreign currency. Worry would better focus, however, not on the size of reserve ratios but on the very existence of something distinct to which ordinary money is linked.In the modern world money is a device for monitoring transactions, keeping records, calculating economic benefits and costs, and accomplishing multilateral clearing. Money enables people conveniently to use the entitlements acquired by delivering goods and services and securities to some trading partners to obtain others of these from other trading partners. The tickets and memoranda employed in these operations need not take the form of little disks of precious metal or even of certificates convertible into them or some other kind of ultimate base money.It would be economically advantageous and feasible to make all money inside money (in the sense of Gurley and Shaw), with the value of the money unit determined and maintained otherwise than through convertibility into a distinct base money, which would have been abolished.     

Monetary aspects of Walras's law and the stock-flow problem

Walras's Law is a tautology. It illuminates interrelations among supplies and demands for goods, services, securities, and money and among their supply/demand imbalances. The Law emphasizes that no one thing or group of things can be in excess supply or excess demand by itself. It thereby helps focus attention on the role in macroeconomic disorder, especially in depression, of a distinctively functioning object of market exchange—money. Yet complications arise, and Walras's Law has itself sometimes been called into question. The purpose of this paper is to clarify the very concepts that enter into the Law and into supposed difficulties. Distinctions between "notional" and "effective" supplies and demands and between stock and flow conceptions of quantities and imbalances require attention.