AN ORDINARY UNDERSTANDING OF HUMAN BEINGS

In this article I elucidate the term ‘human being’ by specifyingconcepts associated to it with intention of  emphasizing the primacy of one concept in particular. This is Wittgenstein’s concept of  an ordinaryhuman being as it is used in the Philosophical Investigations (2009). It is arguedthatthis notion islogically primitive,that is to say,a basic elementinour conceptualrepertoirethat can serveusasa preliminarysourceforanalyzingdiverseaspectsof this individual. The idea is to outlinehere a conceptual framework wherein this individual can be studied

Bolivian public finances, 1882-2010. The challenge to make social spending sustainable

This paper offers a long-term comparative study of Bolivian public finances using a new detailed database. First, it shows that Bolivian government revenues and expenditures were particularly small and volatile until the 1980s. Second, it stresses that, whereas the relative importance of social expenditure has grown constantly since the late 1930s, public revenues have always had an unbalanced structure. Finally, it confirms that budget deficits have been constant, at times reaching levels that were especially damaging for the overall economy. This suggests that the potential redistributive impact of Bolivian public finances was not necessarily (or not only) hindered by the lack of an explicit commitment towards redistributive expenses, but by an extreme vulnerability in the revenue side.Este trabajo ofrece un estudio comparativo y de largo plazo de la hacienda pública boliviana mediante una base de datos desagregada. En primer lugar, muestra que los ingresos y gastos públicos fueron bajos y volátiles hasta los 1980s. En segundo lugar, demuestra que mientras la importancia relativa del gasto social se incrementó desde finales de los 1930s, los ingresos públicos mantuvieron una estructura desequilibrada. Finalmente, confirma que los déficits presupuestarios fueron constantes, llegando a alcanzar algunas veces niveles perjudiciales para el resto de la economía. Ello sugiere que el impacto redistribuidor de la hacienda pública boliviana no estuvo necesariamente (o no solo) restringido por la falta de apoyo explícito a gastos redistributivos, sino por una vulnerabilidad considerable en los ingresos.This research has benefited from financial support from the University of Barcelona through the APIF (2008-2012) fellowship program; from the Science and Innovation Ministry of Spain through project ECO2009-13331-C02-02; from the Catalonian Research and Universities Grant Agency through the BE-DGR 2011 fellowship program

Linking war, natural resources and public revenues: the case of the War of the Pacific (1879-1883)

We argue that wars over natural resources, even if they are limited in their military scope, can have long-term consequences on the level and composition of public revenues. Military success in a resource war may lead to the annexation of natural resource-rich areas from enemy combatants, which provides the winning coalition with valuable and easy-to-tax sources of income. This, however, might discourage new investments in administrative capacity that jeopardize the possibility to establish complex and politically costly taxes in the long-term. This was the case in Chile after it took over the Bolivian and Peruvian coastal regions during the War of the Pacific (1879-1883). In Peru, by contrast, the loss of its nitrate-rich areas brought its fiscal system to the brink of collapse. The impact of the conflict on the Bolivian fiscal system was milder owing to its initial low level of state capacity to control these coastal regions

Tracing the reversal of fortune in the Americas. Bolivian GDP per capita since the mid-nineteenth century

In the centuries before the Spanish conquest, the Bolivian space was among the most highly urbanised and complex societies in the Americas. In contrast, in the early 21st century Bolivia is one of the poorest economies on the continent. According to Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson (2002), this disparity between precolonial opulence and current poverty would make Bolivia a perfect example of 'reversal of fortune' (RF). This hypothesis, however, has been criticised for oversimplifying long-term development processes by 'compressing' history (Austin, 2008). In the case of Bolivia, a comprehensive description and explanation of the RF process would require a global approach to the entire postcolonial period, which has been prevented so far by the lack of quantitative information for the period before 1950. This paper aims to fill that gap by providing new income per capita estimates for Bolivia in 1890-1950 and a point guesstimate for the mid-nineteenth century. Our figures indicate that divergence has not been a persistent feature of Bolivian economic history. Instead, it was concentrated in the 19th century and the second half of the 20th century, and it was actually during the latter that the country joined the ranks of the poorest economies in Latin America. By contrast, during the first half of the 20th century, the country converged with both the industrialised and the richest Latin American economies. The Bolivian postcolonial era cannot therefore be described as one of sustained divergence. Instead, the Bolivian RF was largely the combined result of post-independence stagnation and the catastrophic crises of the late 20th century

A multi-agent traffic simulation framework for evaluating the impact of traffic lights

This is an electronic version of the paper presented at the 3rd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence, held in Rome on 2011The growing of the number of vehicles cause serious strains on road infrastructures. Traffic jams inevitably occur, wasting time and money for both cities and their drivers. To mitigate this problem, traffic simulation tools based on multiagent techniques can be used to quickly prototype potentially problematic scenarios to better understand their inherent causes. This work centers around the effects of traffic light configuration on the flow of vehicles in a road network. To do so, a Multi-Agent Traffic Simulation Framework based on Particle Swarm Optimization techniques has been designed and implemented. Experimental results from this framework show an improvement in the average speed obtained by traffic controlled by adaptive over static traffic lights.This work has been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. Grant TIN2010- 1987

A multi-agent simulation platform applied to the study of urban traffic lights

Proceedings of 6th International Conference on Software and Data Technologies, ICSOFT 2011The Multi-Agent system paradigm allows the development of complex software platforms to be used in a wide range of real-world scenarios. One of the most successful areas these technologies have been applied are in the simulation and optimization of complex systems. Traffic simulation/optimization problems are a specially suitable target for such a platform. This paper proposes a new Multi-Agent simulation platform, where agents are based on a Swarm model (lightweight agents with very low autonomy or proactivity). Using this framework, simulation designers are free to configure road networks of arbitrary complexity, by customizing road width, geometry and intersection with other roads. To simulate different traffic flow scenarios, vehicle trajectories can be defined by choosing start and end locations and providing traffic generation functions for each one trajectory defined. Finally, how many vehicles are generated at each time step can be determined by a time series function. The domain of traffic simulation has been selected to investigate the effect of traffic light configuration on the flow of vehicles in a road network. The experimental results from this platform show a strong correlation between traffic light behavior and the flow of traffic through the network that affects the congestion of the road.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under grant TIN2010-19872 and by Jobssy.com