Indie economics:Social purpose, lay expertise and the unusual rise of modern monetary theory

We argue that the IPE literature on economic expertise has been characterised by ‘methodological elitism’ that makes it ill equipped to account for the influence of heterodox and grassroots forms of expertise. To remedy this, we posit a theoretical framework that emphasises the tensions between two forms of professional legitimacy. One is internal legitimacy and it is rooted in appeals to scientific objectivity, political neutrality and high professional barriers of entry. However, internal legitimacy may clash with external legitimacy, which is a function of a clear articulation of social purpose. Taking the surprising rise of Modern Monetary Theory as a case study, the paper makes two claims. First, its ideas did not coalesce into a distinctive heterodox brand of economics through traditional mechanisms like academic peer-review and citation networks, but through intense online activity. Second, the messaging that spurred MMT consistently combined constitutive claims with explicit declarations of social purpose. The result was an open project with a broad normative appeal, which successfully enrolled a large group of passionate followers and co-creators. To date, IPE scholars have been blind to such alternative forms of knowledge production

Transforming bodywork in eldercare with wash-and-dry toilets

This paper addresses how the introduction of welfare technologies in Denmark makes the body- work of eldercare an object of public governance, and investigates how wash-and-dry toilets co-constitute professional care work. First, a theoretical frame is established for studying care, with an emphasis on bodywork as a sociomaterial and collective accomplishment. The paper then unfolds the great expectations tied to welfare technologies in general, and wash-and-dry toilets specifically. Turning to differentiated examples of situated uses of the toilets, the complexity of making the toilets work within the context of professional eldercare is illustrated. Some of the uses of the toilets in care work are in concordance with policy expectations. Other uses demonstrate difficulties in satisfying the great expectations and call for a more complex understanding of what it takes to achieve dignified, technologically assisted care without silencing the skills and profes- sionalism of care workers

Automatic Amortized Resource Analysis with Regular Recursive Types

The goal of automatic resource bound analysis is to statically infer symbolic bounds on the resource consumption of the evaluation of a program. A longstanding challenge for automatic resource analysis is the inference of bounds that are functions of complex custom data structures. This article builds on type-based automatic amortized resource analysis (AARA) to address this challenge. AARA is based on the potential method of amortized analysis and reduces bound inference to standard type inference with additional linear constraint solving, even when deriving non-linear bounds. A key component of AARA is resource functions that generate the space of possible bounds for values of a given type while enjoying necessary closure properties. Existing work on AARA defined such functions for many data structures such as lists of lists but the question of whether such functions exist for arbitrary data structures remained open. This work answers this questions positively by uniformly constructing resource polynomials for algebraic data structures defined by regular recursive types. These functions are a generalization of all previously proposed polynomial resource functions and can be seen as a general notion of polynomials for values of a given recursive type. A resource type system for FPC, a core language with recursive types, demonstrates how resource polynomials can be integrated with AARA while preserving all benefits of past techniques. The article also proposes the use of new techniques useful for stating the rules of this type system and proving it sound. First, multivariate potential annotations are stated in terms of free semimodules, substantially abstracting details of the presentation of annotations and the proofs of their properties. Second, a logical relation giving semantic meaning to resource types enables a proof of soundness by a single induction on typing derivations.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures; to be published in LICS'2

En højskolevinter. Elevdagbog fra provisorieårene i 1880erne udgivet af Roar Skovmand

A Winter at a Folk High-School.The Diary of a Pupil, from the “Provisional Period” of the 1880’s. (Ed. By Roar Skovmand). Reviewed by Uffe Grosen.Hitherto, in the literature about the history of the folk high-school, there has been no diary to give us clear evidence about the folk high-school as experienced here and now by one of its pupils. The present diary provides us with source material of this very kind, the author being, moreover, an intelligent, mature, and independent mind, a young qualified carpenter, who took an active part as a leader in the gymnastic movement in Stevns, his native district, and joined the winter course of 1884-85 at Vallekilde Folk High-School. He was attracted first of all by Ernst Trier’s strong personality and by Andreas Bentsen, the leader of the artisan department. The diary reveals a listener who is both deeply moved and critical. He refuses to be swept along spiritually, and remains his own self, even when seas run high. The diary was kept in the home of the author Niels Nielsen until his death in 1919. After the death of his wife in 1946 it came into the possession of his daughter Ellen Karlshøj, who died in 1968. It has now, through the agency of the Institut for dansk Skolehistorie, been edited by Prof. Roar Skovmand, and no editor, it may be safely said, could possibly be better qualified for the task. The diary gives an authentic impression of the way in which the pupils were influenced by Ernst Trier. However overwhelming his personality may be said to have been, he appealed to the love of independence in the young pupils. In the preface the editor rightly refers to a letter from Ernst Trier expressing the wish that his views may not be “glued on to the pupils” but that they will be “roused to reflection, to form their own opinions freely and independently”

Årbog for Dansk Skolehistorie, 1967

Yearbook for dansk Skolehistorie, 1967Reviewed by Uffe Grosen.Selskab for dansk Skolehistorie was formed in 1966 and aims at publishing important contributions to the elucidation of school history in the wide sense of this word. Research in this field comes within the province of the Institut for dansk Skolehistorie, established in 1965 in close connection with “Danmarks Lærerhøjskole”. In the first year-book ( 1967) of the Society dr. phil. Roar Skovmand gives an account of the inherent problems of a research which has since 1899 been less than adequate. In this connection he discusses the critical analysis of interviews with people who are still alive. In a picture of the Danish school Grundtvig next to Georg Brandes will play a role similar to that of Plato and Aristotle in the famous “School of Athens” by Raphael. The reviewer misses some clearly drawn portraits here, however, for instance of Ludv. Chr. Müller and P. J. M. Vinther, portraits which might contribute to a heightened interest in the inner life of the school. - In a survey of the contents of the “Stiftsmuseum” of Lolland Falster pertaining to educational history the museum keeper Else-Marie Boyhus gives an excellent illustration of the aims of the Society. - How the Swedish Society Föreningen för svensk undervisningshistoria, established in 1920, meant a stimulus to the formation of the Danish Society is the subject of an article by dr. theol. Knud Eyvin Bugge, who is also the editor of a part of Grundtvig’s curious early work, the comedy Skoleholderne from the summer of 1802. - Skolen for livet ( 1963), K. E. Bugge’s thesis for the doctorate, is reviewed in an article by William Michelsen, a theoretical treatment of the subject “Education and Outlook”. - The centre of gravity of the year-book is the account, by mag. art. Kai Hørby, of Grundtvig’s struggle to establish “The High-School in Soer”, which all but succeded and yet came to nothing. As the reviewer points out the management of the High-School was to be a copy of the absolute rule of the country, but with an advisory organ attached, and Grundtvig expected it to be attended by the brightest and maturest minds among Danish youth, students with an urge to receive education and with a sense of responsibility. — An article dealing with “The Political Debate about the Connection between Board School and Grammar School”, by cand. mag. Vagn Skovgaard-Petersen, illustrates how the Grundtvigian point of view, a self-contained children’s school, suffered defeat in spite of very capable spokesmen. The author concludes with the important remark, however, that Grundtvigian efforts on behalf of the undivided children’s school were continued after 1903—“as we know not unsuccessfully”. Readers will be looking forward to see whether this fine year-book is going to have equally worthy successors

The Naturalization of Gender Segregation in a Danish Bank

Through a qualitative interview analysis of a document handling department in a Danish bank, this article seeks to illuminate central aspects of how some jobs come to be seen as naturally female. Taking gendered organizational theory and Joan Acker’s concept of an ideal employee as our point of departure, we ask whether women are seen as the ideal employees in this femaledominated job function or as a residual to men as the actual ideal employees. The numerical female dominance in the document handling department is articulated as a matter of competencies, job content, and family obligations – for example, by framing women as good at multitasking, as enjoying routine work, and as primary caregivers. The article argues that this construction both draws on and alters historically formed stereotypes in ways that reinforce the gender segregation of the organization and make it hard to change

Reconstructing the past and the poet: Grundtvig and the Anglo-Saxon Phoenix

In 1840, Grundtvig produced a Danish translation of the Anglo-Saxon poemThe Phoenix that reflects some of his ideas concerning history, language, andAnglo-Saxon poetry