AGRIFOOD INDUSTRY AS INDUSTRY INTENSIVELY BASED ON KNOWLEDGE - CASE STUDY OF VOJVODINA

During three-hundred-year history of the market economy, the main sources of wealth creation have changed from the natural resources (mainly land and relatively unskilled labor with the exception of the master craftsman), tangible material assets (buildings, machinery and equipment, funds) to intangible assets (knowledge and information of all types) that may be contained in the people, organizations, or physical resources. In the later period of the twentieth century, science has acquired the features of direct production force. The term direct implies that unlike the relationship which existed between science and production in the IXX century, where scientific advances was incorporated through the physical labor in the tools, which, in turn, created new value through the physical labor, the relationship between science and production has become all direct, immediate, because the scientific advances allowed the funds to be produced with less labor and allowed funds itself to become "smarter" and as such to require less human intervention and human physical labor in the final production process. As a result, the need for physical labor continuously declined with time, and the application of labor is moved from direct production to processes of preparing and organizing production. Also, a large part of today's knowledge that is used in production is not embodied in machinery, and the effects of this are immense.Agricultural industry, Intellectual capital, Efficiency, Valorisation, Agribusiness, Community/Rural/Urban Development, Labor and Human Capital,

Labor Economics

The authors hypothesize that most labor economists sooner or later had to incorporate at least the appearance of institutional concerns in their papers to avoid indigestion whenever lunching with colleagues outside the field of economics They add: If the new interests of modern labor economics are in fact driven by the imperatives of science, then the institutionalist and the neoclassical approaches may well synthesize

The particle system model of income and wealth more likely to imply an analogue of thermodynamics in social science

The Inequality Process (IP) and the Saved Wealth Model (SW) are particle system models of income distribution. The IP’s social science meta-theory requires its stationary distribution to fit the distribution of labor income conditioned on education. The Saved Wealth Model (SW) is an ad hoc modification of the particle system model of the Kinetic Theory of Gases (KTG). The KTG implies the laws of gas thermodynamics. The IP is a particle system similar to the SW and KTG, but less closely related to the KTG than the SW. This paper shows that the IP passes the key empirical test required of it by its social science meta-theory better than the SW. The IP’s advantage increases as the U.S. labor force becomes more educated. The IP is the more likely of the two particle systems to underlie an analogue of gas thermodynamics in social science as the KTG underlies gas thermodynamics.Inequality Process; Kinetic Theory of Gases; labor income distribution; particle system; Saved Wealth Model, social science analogue of thermodynamics

Trade-offs in motivating volunteer effort: Experimental evidence on voluntary contributions to science.

Digitization has facilitated the proliferation of crowd science by lowering the cost of finding individuals with the willingness to participate in science without pay. However, the factors that influence participation and the outcomes of voluntary participation are unclear. We report two findings from a field experiment on the world's largest crowd science platform that tests how voluntary contributions to science are affected by providing clarifying information on either the desired outcome of a scientific task or the labor requirements for completing the task. First, there is significant heterogeneity in the motivations and ability of contributors to crowd science. Second, both of the information interventions lead to significant decreases in the quantity and increases in the quality of contributions. Combined, our findings are consistent with the information interventions improving match quality between the task and the volunteer. Our findings suggest that science can be democratized by engaging individuals with varying skill levels and motivations with small changes in the information provided to participants

Distributed Cognition and the Task of Science

This paper gives a characterization of distributed cognition (d-cog) and explores ways that the framework might be applied in studies of science. I argue that a system can only be given a d-cog description if it is thought of as performing a task. Turning our attention to science, we can try to give a global d-cog account of science or local d-cog accounts of particular scientific projects. Several accounts of science can be seen as global d-cog accounts: Robert Merton's sociology of scientific norms, Philip Kitcher's 20th-century account of cognitive labor, and Kitcher's 21st-century notion of well-ordered science. Problems that arise for them arise just because of the way that they attribute a function to science. The paper concludes by considering local d-cog accounts. Here, too, the task is the crux of the matter

A quantitative perspective on ethics in large team science

The gradual crowding out of singleton and small team science by large team endeavors is challenging key features of research culture. It is therefore important for the future of scientific practice to reflect upon the individual scientist's ethical responsibilities within teams. To facilitate this reflection we show labor force trends in the US revealing a skewed growth in academic ranks and increased levels of competition for promotion within the system; we analyze teaming trends across disciplines and national borders demonstrating why it is becoming difficult to distribute credit and to avoid conflicts of interest; and we use more than a century of Nobel prize data to show how science is outgrowing its old institutions of singleton awards. Of particular concern within the large team environment is the weakening of the mentor-mentee relation, which undermines the cultivation of virtue ethics across scientific generations. These trends and emerging organizational complexities call for a universal set of behavioral norms that transcend team heterogeneity and hierarchy. To this end, our expository analysis provides a survey of ethical issues in team settings to inform science ethics education and science policy.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, 1 table. Keywords: team ethics; team management; team evaluation; science of scienc

A Dynamic Analysis of Human Welfare in a Warming Planet

Climate science indicates that climate stabilization requires low GHG emissions. Is this consistent with nondecreasing human welfare? Our welfare index, called quality of life (QuoL), emphasizes education, knowledge, and the environment. We construct and calibrate a multigenerational model with intertemporal links provided by education, physical capital, knowledge and the environment. We reject discounted utilitarianism and adopt, first, the Intergenerational Maximin criterion, and, second, Human Development Optimization, that maximizes the QuoL of the first generation subject to a given future rate of growth. We apply these criteria to our calibrated model via a novel algorithm inspired by the turnpike property. The computed paths yield levels of QuoL higher than the year 2000 level for all generations. They require the doubling of the fraction of labor resources devoted to the creation of knowledge relative to the reference level, whereas the fractions of labor allocated to consumption and leisure are similar to the reference ones. On the other hand, higher growth rates require substantial increases in the fraction of labor devoted to education, together with moderate increases in the fractions of labor devoted to knowledge and the investment in physical capital.Quality of life, Climate change, Education, Maximin, Growth

Generalizing the Causal Effect of Fertility on Female Labor Supply

Abstract We study the effect of fertility on labor supply in Argentina and Mexico exploiting a source of exogenous variability in family size first introduced by Angrist and Evans (1998) for the United States. Our results constitute the first external validation of the estimates obtained for the US. External validation of empirical results is central to the making of rigorous science, but there are very few attempts to establish it. We find that the estimates for the US can be generalized both qualitatively and quantitatively to the populations of two developing countries where, compared to the US, fertility is known to be higher, female education levels are much lower and there are fewer facilities for childcare.Causality, Internal and External Validity, Childbearing and Female Labor Supply