City and Countryside Revisited. Comparative rent movements in London and the South-East, 1580-1914

Economic historians have traditionally argued that urban growth in England was driven primarily by prior improvements in agricultural supply in the two centuries before the industrial revolution. Recent revisionist scholarship by writers such as Jan Luiten van Zanden and Robert Allen has suggested that 'the city drove the countryside, not the reverse'. This paper assembles new serial data on urban and agricultural rent movements in Kent, Essex and London, from 1580-1914, which enables us to provide a tentative estimate of the strength of the urban variable and the productivity of land across the rural-urban continuum. Our initial findings support the revisionist view, and throw new light on London's position within the wider metropolitan region. Comparative rent movements suggests a greater continuity between town and countryside than has often been assumed, with sharp increases in rental values occurring on the rural-urban fringes of London and the lower Medway valley

Time-Dependent Density-Functional Theory for the Stopping Power of an Interacting Electron Gas for Slow Ions

Based on the time-dependent density-functional theory, we have derived a rigorous formula for the stopping power of an {\it interacting} electron gas for ions in the limit of low projectile velocities. If dynamical correlation between electrons is not taken into account, this formula recovers the corresponding stopping power of {\it noninteracting} electrons in an effective Kohn-Sham potential. The correlation effect, specifically the excitonic one in electron-hole pair excitations, however, is found to considerably enhance the stopping power for intermediately charged ions, bringing our theory into good agreement with experiment.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure, Accepted to Phys. Rev. B (Rapid Communication

Constructing bilayers with tuneable ring statistics and topologies

A computationally tractable method is developed and described to generate two-dimensional networks with the aim of producing configurations for thin films (bilayers) of SiO2 and related materials. The method developed allows ideal (defect-free) networks of any given shape to be grown from seeds with both tuneable ring statistics (ring distributions) and topologies, the latter characterised by the Aboav–Weaire parameter, α. The method developed is demonstrated by growing networks which differ in their ring distributions and topologies as controlled by a combination of the choice of the ‘allowed’ rings and the effective growth ‘temperature’. Configurations are generated with Aboav–Weaire parameters commensurate with those obtained from an analysis of experimental configurations, improving significantly on previous methods for generating these networks (which systematically underestimate this parameter). The ability to efficiently grow configurations allows us to explore the structural basis of Lemaitre's law (which couples the underlying network ring distribution second moment with the fraction of six-membered rings, p6) in terms of maximum entropy. A rationale for the commonly observed value of p6∼0.4 is presented as a balance between entropic and enthalpic contributions to the free energy. The deviations of the respective ring areas from the ideal are discussed and the relative insensitivity of the ring area (in systems of this type) to relatively strong distortions is highlighted

Tawney and the third way

From the 1920s to the 1950s R. H. Tawney was the most influential socialist thinker in Britain. He articulated an ethical socialism at odds with powerful statist and mechanistic traditions in British socialist thinking. Tawney's work is thus an important antecedent to third way thinking. Tawney's religiously-based critique of the morality of capitalism was combined with a concern for detailed institutional reform, challenging simple dichotomies between public and private ownership. He began a debate about democratizing the enterprise and corporate governance though his efforts fell on stony ground. Conversely, Tawney's moralism informed a whole-hearted condemnation of market forces in tension with both his concern with institutional reform and modern third way thought. Unfortunately, he refused to engage seriously with emergent welfare economics which for many social democrats promised a more nuanced understanding of the limits of market forces. Tawney's legacy is a complex one, whose various elements form a vital part of the intellectual background to current third way thinking