Dissolving the Chimera of the ‘Adam Smith Problem’

In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith set out his influential theory that societies achieve prosperity by securing the freedom of individuals to pursue their own end by the means they choose within a framework of rules of justice. In his earlier work The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith developed his thesis about the origins of our moral sentiments and the emergence of rules of justice. The socalled ‘Adam Smith Problem’ concerns the perceived inconsistency between Smith’s defence of selfinterest in the Wealth of Nations and his emphasis of sympathy as the origin of moral sentiments in the earlier work. The existence of the ‘Adam Smith Problem’ has been contested by many writers. The present author provides a number of new arguments to demonstrate the illusory nature of the problem by revisiting the key elements Smith’s moral theory. The author argues that the problem dissolves when the role of justice in providing the conditions of free trade is understood. Smith’s tirade against wealth worship is explained as part of his defence of justice and not a condemnation of wealth accumulation. According to this reading, the Theory of Moral Sentiments is a powerful statement of the moral basis of capitalism.

Securing Constitutional Government: The Perpetual Challenge

Constitutional government is an ideal and like all ideals can only be achieved as an approximation. Even those countries that appear to be near the ideal are revealed on examination to be not so near. Constitutional government, to the extent it is achieved reflects a state of affairs. It remains under constant threat from power seekers, ideological opponents, ill-informed social engineers and manipulative special interests. It is also being eroded through the serious depletion of social capital in the post-industrial era that weakens the institutional foundations of constitutional government (Fukuyama, 1999). In other countries, economic circumstances, cultural constraints and entrenched ruling classes create seemingly intractable obstacles to the attainment of acceptable levels of constitutional government. It is a predicament that seriously harms not just the unfortunate peoples of these countries but, as I argue presently, also the industrialised democracies of the world. Hence deepening our understanding of the conditions that make constitutional government possible remains an intellectual task of the highest priority.constitutional government; rule of law; institutions

Securing Constitutional Government: The Perpetual Challenge.

The paper discusses four conditions required for the maintenance of constitutional government, identifying them as the dominance of a particular conception of constitutional government, its official recognition and implementation by a written or traditional constitution, the existence of an institutional matrix that translates the constitution into the experience of the people and the achievement of economic conditions that sustain the institutional foundations of constitutionalism. The author attributes the decline in the classical understanding of constitutionalism to both public choice dynamics as well as to intellectual reconstructions of key concepts such as law, justice, and freedom that were designed to facilitate the welfare state without formally forsaking the rule of law ideal. The paper proceeds to focus on the social disruption of the late 20th century that weakened the institutional foundations of constitutionalism and the legal and economic causes of this development. It cautions against over-reliance on the self-correcting potential of social systems and concludes with thoughts on strategies appropriate to the perpetual struggle to maintain constitutional government.

Environmentalism versus Constitutionalism: a Contest without Winners

The New Zealand Resource Management Act imposes a system for micro-managing the environment. The Act is typical of current state approaches to environmental protection that places heavy reliance on command and control systems in preference to market based systems. Such laws impact heavily on property rights and due process and generally undermine the rule of law by creating centres of arbitrary authority. They also prevent the harnessing of widely dispersed knowledge that is vital to the determination of the costs and benefits of conservation and the development of realistic policy. These measures have been justified on the basis of the ‘precautionary principle’ and the concept of sustainable development and they are supported by claims of scientific consensus about major environmental issues such as climate change. The essay questions this consensus and argues that the precautionary principle and sustainable development are vacuous but dangerous doctrines. The apocalyptic and utopian visions of conservation are challenged and an evolutionary conceptualisation of the environment is proposed. The essay discusses the importance of property rights and compensation for takings as means of advancing legitimate environmental goals and argues that the New Zealand Resource Management Act is a deeply flawed model that imposes serious economic and constitutional costs that ultimately will weaken society’s capacity to achieve those goals.

Laser frequency locking by direct measurement of detuning

We present a new method of laser frequency locking in which the feedback signal is directly proportional to the detuning from an atomic transition, even at detunings many times the natural linewidth of the transition. Our method is a form of sub-Doppler polarization spectroscopy, based on measuring two Stokes parameters ($I_2$ and $I_3$) of light transmitted through a vapor cell. This extends the linear capture range of the lock loop by up to an order of magnitude and provides equivalent or improved frequency discrimination as other commonly used locking techniques.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures Revte

Growth dynamics of a Bose-Einstein condensate in a dimple trap without cooling

We study the formation of a Bose-Einstein condensate in a cigar-shaped three-dimensional harmonic trap, induced by the controlled addition of an attractive "dimple" potential along the weak axis. In this manner we are able to induce condensation without cooling due to a localized increase in the phase space density. We perform a quantitative analysis of the thermodynamic transformation in both the sudden and adiabatic regimes for a range of dimple widths and depths. We find good agreement with equilibrium calculations based on self-consistent semiclassical Hartree-Fock theory describing the condensate and thermal cloud. We observe there is an optimal dimple depth that results in a maximum in the condensate fraction. We also study the non-equilibrium dynamics of condensate formation in the sudden turn-on regime, finding good agreement for the observed time dependence of the condensate fraction with calculations based on quantum kinetic theory.Comment: v1: 9 pages, 7 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev. A; v2: 10 pages, 8 figures, fixed typos, added references, additional details on experimental procedure, values of phase-space density, new figure and discussion on effects of three-body loss in Appendix B (replaced with published version

Unified Framework for Public Sector Microfinance Service Delivery

When a country is driving towards achieving her social and economic developmentgoals, a very important and necessary factor is the contribution from Entrepreneurs and Smalland Medium Scale Enterprises (SMEs). In this context, it is very clear that National Micro-Finance Institutes (MFIs), mainly in the Sri Lankan Cooperative Sector and other publicorganizations engaged in micro-financing have a greater responsibility and also have to play akey role to bring-up citizens at lower layers of as per se El Salvador Enterprise Pyramid. Whenstudying success cases in the sector, MFIs have to deliver not only pure micro-finance services,but also a variety of other social services such as capacity building, awareness and soft-skilldevelopment, etc.However, our investigations show that majority of deficiencies that are currently facedby the micro-financing service sector, in particular public MFIs could readily be overcome withpromising productivity and efficiency results by introducing advancements in ICT.With the experience authors have collected with the engagement in a leadingmicrofinance solution provider in Sri Lanka and with the involvement in global businessstandards, in this work, a unified framework for microfinance service delivery and integrationhas been proposed. The adopted methodology to build the said solution could be considered as ahybrid approach between design science and action research. That is because, adopted cyclicapproach starts with having awareness of the pertaining problems in the sector, then deploymentof IT solutions to mitigate them and finally evaluation that resulted conclusions with importantfeedback to the development and deployment. Further, the awareness and the knowledge aboutthe sector have been collected from active participation of authors in the “community ofpractice”.The developed working model provides a solution to a long standing need for a UnifiedFramework Micro-Finance service delivery in compliance with global standards. Theframework capable of provide systematic support for Micro-Finance solution development.Further the developed framework could facilitate interoperability and integration with new andlegacy peripheral business application around micro-financing sector. We are expectinginvolvement and contribution from relevant authorities take forward these benefits for thecommunity in need for betterment of the citizens.Key words: Micro-Finance service Integration, Interoperability, Service modeling,Global standard