"The Role of the Government in Facilitating TFP Growth during Japan's Rapid Growth Era"

Japan experienced high growth of TFP following World War II. This paper studies the sources of this technological growth and documents the role played by different government policies in achieving such growth. We find that in nonagricultural sectors, TFP growth occurred at first through the import of foreign technologies via licensing, and subsequently through the innovation of its own technologies. In agriculture, TFP grew mostly through the development of its own technologies. The Japanese government played a part in the growth of TFP by directing the adoption of foreign technologies, promoting coordination of R&D activities, and setting up channels for the domestic diffusion of available technologies.

Ideology is theft: Thoughts on the legitimacy of a Maori psychology

‘War, in fact, can be seen as a process of achieving equilibrium among unequal technologies’ (McLuhan, 1964) We are at war. As Western science and its accompanying technology expands the frontiers of knowledge at an ever-increasing rate, ‘indigenous’ perspectives of knowledge are exiled into the borderlands of special interest groups and localized research programmes. Mainstream scientific thought lays claim to objective interpretations of experience at the expense of alternative realities offered by emerging theories of knowledge. Furthermore, as localized worldviews (i.e., those derived from ancestral knowledge bases and pre-industrial or non-scientific premises) challenge existing paradigms, the inevitable interactions threaten to undermine the fidelity of this knowledge. One such arena where this ideological conflict is apparent is the growing field of Maori psychology

ASSESSING THE ECONOMIC VALUE OF RESEARCH

For almost half a century World War II and the Cold War provided the political and fiscal context for public investment in science and technology. The report prepared by Vannevar Bush, Science: the Endless Frontier (1945), advanced an investment rationale for federal support of scientific research. In spite of pressure from Congress and the Office of the President the scientific community has resisted the development and application of operational economic criteria for the allocation of research resources.Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

Cross-Country Technology Adoption: Making the Theories Face the Facts.

We examine the diffusion of more than twenty technologies across twenty-three of the world ’s leading industrial economies. Our evidence covers major technology classes such as textile production, steel manufacture, communications, information technology, transportation, and electricity for the period 1788-2001. We document the common patterns observed in the diffusion of this broad range of technologies. Our results suggest a pattern of trickle-down diffusion that is remarkably robust across technologies. Most of the technologies that we consider originate in advanced economies and are adopted there first. Subsequently, they trickle down to countries that lag economically. Our panel data analysis indicates that the most important determinants of the speed at which a country adopts technologies are the country’s human capital endowment, type of government, degree of openness to trade, and adoption of predecessor technologies. We also find that the overall rate of diffusion has increased markedly since World War II because of the convergence in these variables across countries.ECONOMIC GROWTH; HISTORICAL DATA; TECHNOLOGY ADOPTION.

Space and the Atom: On the Popular Geopolitics of Cold War Rocketry

This paper considers the imbricated domains of space exploration and Cold War geopolitics by following the trajectory of the 'Corporal', the world's first guided missile authorised to carry a nuclear warhead. It examines the popular geopolitics of rocketry as both a technology of mass destruction and as a vehicle for the transcendent dreams of extra-terrestrial discovery. Avoiding both technical and statist accounts, the paper shows how these technologies of Cold War strategic advantage were activated and sustained through popular media and everyday experience. Particular attention is given to such mundane activities as children's play, citing the example of die-cast miniature toys of the Corporal. Through such apparently modest means, nuclear weapons were made intelligible in, and transposable to, a domestic context. The paper is also situated within a wider emerging literature on geographies and geopolitics of outer space.</p

Super Soldiers and Technological Asymmetry

In this chapter I argue that emerging soldier enhancement technologies have the potential to transform the ethical character of the relationship between combatants, in conflicts between ‘Superpower’ militaries, with the ability to deploy such technologies, and technologically disadvantaged ‘Underdog’ militaries. The reasons for this relate to Paul Kahn’s claims about the paradox of riskless warfare. When an Underdog poses no threat to a Superpower, the standard just war theoretic justifications for the Superpower’s combatants using lethal violence against their opponents breaks down. Therefore, Kahn argues, combatants in that position must approach their opponents in an ethical guise relevantly similar to ‘policing’. I argue that the kind of disparities in risk and threat between opposing combatants that Kahn’s analysis posits, don’t obtain in the context of face-to-face combat, in the way they would need to in order to support his ethical conclusions about policing. But then I argue that soldier enhancement technologies have the potential to change this, in a way that reactivates the force of those conclusions

On the Nature and Causes of the Collapse of the Wealth of Nations, 2007-2008: The End of a Façade Called Globalization

In this working paper, Erinç Yeldan investigates the 2007-2008 financial crisis, hailed as the most devastating (and complex) crisis of capitalism since the great depression of 1929. He suggests that the 2007-2008 crisis was not the end result of a series of technical errors or ad hoc developments that occurred on their own, but was instead the result of the systemic imbalances of capitalism over the last three decades. In order to evaluate the conditions of the global crisis more clearly, Yeldan considers it critical that its underlying structural causes are understood. The paper reflects the Marxian literature on crises, prominently that of Rosa Luxemburg, pointing out to the necessity of a ‘corrective war’ in order to break with old institutions, old technologies, and old methods of accumulation.Crises of capitalism; Bretton Woods system, golden age of capital; financialization; corrective war

Hostage videos in the War on Terror

About the book: The bodies of the dead or the soon to be dead litter the media landscape and they frame the representation of war, terror and conflict in the modern age. What are the meanings carried and conveyed by these war bodies on screen? The discussion of the war body on screen is best served by drawing upon multiple and diverging view points, differing academic backgrounds and methodological approaches. A multi-disciplinary approach is essential in order to capture and interpret the complexity of the war body on screen and its many manifestations. In this collection, contributors utilize textual analysis, psychoanalysis, post-colonialism, comparative analysis, narrative theory, discourse analysis, representation and identity as their theoretical footprints. Analysis of the impact of new media and information technologies on the construction and transmission of war bodies is also been addressed. The War Body on Screen has a highly original structure, with themed sections organized around ‘the body of the soldier’; ‘the body of the terrorist’; and ‘the body of the hostage’

Taking apart the roads ahead: user power versus the futurology of IT

How often have futurologists ever succeeded in making accurate global predictions? Bell’s utopian vision of a leisure-laden ‘Post-Industrial’ society now seems hopelessly naive; Fukuyama’s ‘End of history’ thesis was arguably just a fleeting Reaganite delusion about the stabilization of post Cold War politics. Notwithstanding the failure of such widely hailed prophesies, and despite the lack of any well-attested laws about the historical development of information technologies, a brazenly upbeat futurology pervades many debates on new IT. This is most obviously the case in Bill Gates’ recently updated The Road Ahead. To challenge Gates’ prognostications about the future of information technologies, I will argue for the importance of users (vis-à-vis producers) in the social shaping and ‘consumption’ of IT, especially the power of many (if not necessarily all) such users to resist falling into futures that others prescribe for them. I contend that the non-passivity of IT users undermines the cogency of any claims about the inevitability of technological change, and helps to explain why so many past ‘futures’ of IT have never fully materialized