The evolution and policy implications of Phillips curve analysis

The policy implications of the Phillips curve relationship between inflation and unemployment have changed dramatically in the twenty-seven years since A.W. Phillips first identified a negative correlation between money wage changes and joblessness in Great Britain. Originally, Phillips’ own findings suggested that policymakers could move the economy along his curve, trading off higher inflation for lower unemployment until the best (or least undesirable) attainable combination of both had been reached. Today, such a view is widely discredited. The statistical relation between inflation and unemployment has broken down and the Phillips curve is now generally viewed as offering no trade-off at all. This radical change in the policy implications of the Phillips curve did not occur all at once; rather it was the cumulative result of a series of theoretical innovations, which Thomas M. Humphrey chronicles in “The Evolution and Policy Implications of Phillips Curve Analysis.” The two most important innovations were the natural rate hypothesis, which implies that unemployment can be reduced below its normal rate only by fooling the public with surprise inflation, and the rational expectations hypothesis, which implies that the public cannot be systematically fooled. Together, these two hypotheses imply that no systematic macroeconomic policy can affect unemployment. Even though no inflation-unemployment trade-off exists for policymakers to exploit, as Humphrey points out, policymakers can still contribute to reducing the variability and average level of unemployment by avoiding erratic policy changes and by enacting measures to improve the efficiency and performance of labor and product markets.Phillips curve

Can we be both resilient and well, and what choices do people have? Incorporating agency into the resilience debate from a fisheries perspective.

In the midst of a global fisheries crisis, there has been great interest in the fostering of adaptation and resilience in fisheries, as a means to reduce vulnerability and improve the capacity of fishing society to adapt to change. However, enhanced resilience does not automatically result in improved well-being of people, and adaptation strategies are riddled with difficult choices, or trade-offs, that people must negotiate. This paper uses the context of fisheries to explore some apparent tensions between adapting to change on the one hand, and the pursuit of well-being on the other, and illustrates that trade-offs can operate at different levels of scale. It argues that policies that seek to support fisheries resilience need to be built on a better understanding of the wide range of consequences that adaptation has on fisher well-being, the agency people exert in negotiating their adaptation strategies, and how this feeds back into the resilience of fisheries as a social-ecological system. The paper draws from theories on agency and adaptive preferences to illustrate how agency might be better incorporated into the resilience debate

Towards High Performance Video Object Detection

There has been significant progresses for image object detection in recent years. Nevertheless, video object detection has received little attention, although it is more challenging and more important in practical scenarios. Built upon the recent works, this work proposes a unified approach based on the principle of multi-frame end-to-end learning of features and cross-frame motion. Our approach extends prior works with three new techniques and steadily pushes forward the performance envelope (speed-accuracy tradeoff), towards high performance video object detection