Letter to Bichler and Nitzan: points of agreement and disagreement on the labour theory of value and on power

Commentary on and critique of Bichler and Nitzan’s power theory of value and capital accumulation

Voting power measurement: a story of misreinvention

In this account of the history of voting-power measurement, we confine ourselves to the concept of a priori voting power. We show how the concept was re-invented several times and how the circumstances in which it was reinvented led to conceptual confusion as to the true meaning of what is being measured. In particular, power-as-influence was conflated with value in the sense of transferable utility cooperative game theory (power as share in constant total payoff). Influence was treated, improperly, as though it were transferable utility, and hence an additive and distributive quantity. We provide examples of the resulting misunderstanding and mis-directed criticism

Collective decision-making and supervision in a communist society

This article brings together my commitment to communism and my scientific work in the theory of social choice, particularly the measurement of voting power. I have been composing it, on and off, for several years: writing a few paragraphs, then putting it aside and turning to more urgent current tasks. Originally I used the term ‘socialism ’ in the title and the body of the arti-cle; but I have now changed this to ‘communism’. Let me explain why. The terms ‘communist ’ and ‘communism ’ have undergone a significant semantic shift since the beginning of the 21st century. For long these terms had been usurped and virtually monopolized by Stalinized ‘official communism’. For this reason, anti-Stalinist communists tended to avoid these terms as self-description and a description of the kind of society they strive for. Instead, they used terms such as ‘revolutionary socialists ’ as self-description, and ‘so-cialism ’ for their aim. (The term ‘socialism ’ was also usurped by Stalinists, but they never managed to monopolize it.) However, with the collapse of ‘of-ficial communism’, there has been a growing tendency to reclaim the forme

Comment on Schmidtchen and Steunenberg

Tujuan penelitian: (1) hubungan antara pemanfaatan perpustakaan sekolah dan prestasi belajar siswa Sosiologi, (2) hubungan antara minat baca siswa dan prestasi belajar Sosiologi, (3) hubungan antara pemanfaatan perpustakaan sekolah dan minat baca siswa dengan prestasi belajar Sosiologi. Penelitian ini mengambil lokasi di SMA Negeri 5 Surakarta. Metode: Penelitian ini menggunakan metode deskriptif kuantitatif korelasional. Populasi siswa kelompok IPS SMA Negeri 5 Surakarta tahun pelajaran 2012/2013, sebanyak 339 siswa. Teknik pengambilan sampel yang digunakan adalah multistage cluster random sampling. Besarnya sampel yang digunakan 25% dari populasi pada kelas XI IPS 1 sampai dengan kelas XI IPS 4 yang berjumlah 124 siswa, dengan banyaknya sampel 32 siswa yang terbagi atas 4 kelas. Teknik pengumpulan data dilakukan dengan menggunakan tes untuk mengetahui prestasi, angket digunakan untuk mengetahui pemanfaatan perpustakaan sekolah dan minat baca siswa, dan dokumentasi dilakukan untuk mengetahui jumlah siswa. Teknik analisis data yang dipakai menggunakan analisis statistik dengan teknik regresi ganda/ multipel. Hasil: Berdasarkan hasil penelitian, diambil kesimpulan bahwa: (1) ada hubungan yang cukup signifikan antara pemanfaatan perpustakaan sekolah dan prestasi belajar siswa dilihat dari hasil analisis data yang menunjukkan rx1y = 0,262 dan ρ = 0,144. Dengan demikian hipotesis yang berbunyi “Ada hubungan yang cukup signifikan antara pemanfaatan perpustakaan sekolah dan prestasi belajar Sosiologi Di SMA Negeri 5 Surakarta tahun pelajaran 2012/2013” diterima, (2) ada hubungan yang signifikan antara minat baca siswa dengan prestasi belajar dilihat dari hasil analisis data yang menunjukkan rx2y = 0,359 dan ρ = 0,041. Dengan demikian hipotesis yang berbunyi “Ada hubungan yang signifikan antara minat baca siswa dan prestasi belajar Sosiologi Di SMA Negeri 5 Surakarta tahun pelajaran 2012/2013” diterima, (3) ada hubungan yang cukup signifikan antara pemanfaatan perpustakaan sekolah dan minat baca siswa dengan prestasi belajar dilihat dari analisis data yang menunjukkan Ry(x1x2) = 0,387 dan ρ = 0,094 serta F = 2,549. Sehingga hipotesis yang berbunyi “Ada hubungan yang cukup signifikan antara pemanfaatan perpustakaan sekolah dan minat baca siswa dengan prestasi belajar Sosiologi Di SMA Negeri 5 Surakarta tahun pelajaran 2012/2013” diterima

Analysis of QM rule adopted by the EU Inter-Governmental Conference Brussels, 18 June 2004

We analyse and evaluate the qualified majority (QM) decision rule for the Council of Ministers of the EU adopted at the EU Inter-Governmental Conference, Brussels, 18 June 2004 [1]. We compare this rule with the QM rule prescribed in the Treaty of Nice, and the rule included in the original draft Constitution proposed by the European Convention in July 2003. We use a method similar to the one we used in [3] and [4]

A note on measuring voters’ responsibility

We consider a singular event of the following form: in a simple voting game, a particular division of the voters resulted in a positive outcome. We propose a plausible measure that quantifies the causal contribution of any given voter to the outcome. This measure is based on a conceptual analysis due to Braham [1], but differs from his solution to the problem of measuring causality of singular events