Fertility, social class, gender, and the professional model: statistical explanation and historical significance

In 2012 Barnes and Guinnane published a revised statistical analysis of the critical evaluation of the official 1911 social class model of fertility decline that was presented in chapter 6 of Szreter’s Fertility Class and Gender in Britain, 1860-1940 (FCG). They argue that the official model of five ranked social classes is, after all, a satisfactory statistical summary of the fertility variance found among the married couples of England and Wales at the famous 1911 fertility census and so they conclude that, pace Szreter, the official model provides a satisfactory account of the nation’s fertility decline as one of social class differentials. It is acknowledged here that B&G have deployed superior statistical techniques. But it is pointed-out that FCG identified far more fundamental problems with the design of the 1911 official model. It was a social evolutionary model privileging male professional occupations, not a modelling of recognised social class theory at the time or since. In FCG it was therefore termed ‘the professional model’. The central historiographical claim of Fertility, Class and Gender is re-affirmed: that in order to study fruitfully and to further elucidate the complex historical relationship between social class and the fertility decline among married couples in England and Wales, an alternative approach to that of the professional model of fertility variation is needed, one which explicitly integrates gender relations with social class.This is the accepted manuscript. It's currently embargoed until 19/03/2017. The final version is available from Wiley at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ehr.12102/abstrac

Incentivising an ethical economics: A radical plan to force a step change in the quality and quantity of the UK's economic growth

Our analysis looks at previous periods of British economic history to identify the enabling conditions for our most successful episodes of economic growth, noting the crucial importance of large-scale improvements in welfare and human capital to their success, and the negative impacts when these policies were reversed. In its own prescription for kick-starting growth, IPPR calls for a rebalancing of power to move the economy out of its current low wage/low productivity equilibrium. This, IPPR’s Commission on Economic Justice argues, requires a shift in power from: corporate management to employees/trade unions; short-term financial interests to long-term investors; dominant companies to entrepreneurs; Westminster to the nations and regions; and households with great wealth to those with little. We agree wholeheartedly that such structural and institutional change, including a greater emphasis on localities, allied to significant revenue-raising tax and wealth redistribution, is essential to deliver a step change in the quantity and quality of economic growth. We argue that this must be achieved through reconceptualising the welfare system as a growth promoter. Our radical proposal provides a general, motivating mechanism to achieve this

Modularity and Openness in Modeling Multi-Agent Systems

We revisit the formalism of modular interpreted systems (MIS) which encourages modular and open modeling of synchronous multi-agent systems. The original formulation of MIS did not live entirely up to its promise. In this paper, we propose how to improve modularity and openness of MIS by changing the structure of interference functions. These relatively small changes allow for surprisingly high flexibility when modeling actual multi-agent systems. We demonstrate this on two well-known examples, namely the trains, tunnel and controller, and the dining cryptographers. Perhaps more importantly, we propose how the notions of multi-agency and openness, crucial for multi-agent systems, can be precisely defined based on their MIS representations.Comment: In Proceedings GandALF 2013, arXiv:1307.416

How and why does history matter for development policy ?

The consensus among scholars and policymakers that"institutions matter"for development has led inexorably to a conclusion that"history matters,"since institutions clearlyform and evolve over time. Unfortunately, however, the next logical step has not yet been taken, which is to recognize that historians (and not only economic historians) might also have useful and distinctive insights to offer. This paper endeavors to open and sustain a constructive dialogue between history -- understood as both"the past"and"the discipline"-- and development policy by (a) clarifying what the craft of historical scholarship entails, especially as it pertains to understanding causal mechanisms, contexts, and complex processes of institutional change; (b) providing examples of historical research that support, qualify, or challenge the most influential research (by economists and economic historians) in contemporary development policy; and (c) offering some general principles and specific implications that historians, on the basis of the distinctive content and method of their research, bring to development policy debates.Cultural Policy,Economic Theory&Research,Population Policies,Cultural Heritage&Preservation,Development Economics&Aid Effectiveness

Theories and heuristics: how best to approach the study of historic fertility declines?

"This paper argues that a move away from a unifying but teleological framework for studying fertility declines can only been intellectually emancipating and is a necessary precondition for scientific advance. The study of change in human reproduction is an immensely complex and multi-faceted problem which requires the combination of both quantitative and qualitative forms of evidence and their respective methodologies of enquiry. The theoretical challenge is to construct an intellectually facilitating heuristic framework for synthesis of comparative, multidisciplinary study of the multiple fertility declines that have occurred, not to seek a replacement 'general narrative' for discredited demographic transition and modernization theories. Quantitative historical demography can only gain in its explanatory power by engaging with studies which also incorporate research into such qualitative aspects of gender as sex and power and which address a more historicist understanding of the role of culture by exploring its relationship with institutions, ideology and politics. It is argued that a number of recent, contextualized local and comparative studies of fertility declines are demonstrating how productively to combine quantitative and qualitative methods to explore rigorously these aspects of the history of fertility declines. Within the heuristic framework envisaged here, priorities for further research in the future would include exploring comparatively the relationship between reproductive change and communication communities with respect to the ideologically and politically-mediated issues of sex, religion, health, disease and education." (author's abstract

Henri Temianka Correspondence; (szreter)

This collection contains material pertaining to the life, career, and activities of Henri Temianka, violin virtuoso, conductor, music teacher, and author. Materials include correspondence, concert programs and flyers, music scores, photographs, and books.https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/temianka_correspondence/4190/thumbnail.jp

Chapter Twelve Revealing the Hidden Affliction

By the turn of the twentieth century the British nation’s declining birthrate was increasingly the subject of anxious public and scientific debate, as the Registrar General’s annual reports continued to confirm a downward national trend, which had in fact commenced from the late 1870s

Comparing BDD and SAT based techniques for model checking Chaum's Dining Cryptographers Protocol

We analyse different versions of the Dining Cryptographers protocol by means of automatic verification via model checking. Specifically we model the protocol in terms of a network of communicating automata and verify that the protocol meets the anonymity requirements specified. Two different model checking techniques (ordered binary decision diagrams and SAT-based bounded model checking) are evaluated and compared to verify the protocols

Bounded Model Checking for Linear Time Temporal-Epistemic Logic

We present a novel approach to the verification of multi-agent systems using bounded model checking for specifications in LTLK, a linear time temporal-epistemic logic. The method is based on binary decision diagrams rather than the standard conversion to Boolean satisfiability. We apply the approach to two classes of interpreted systems: the standard, synchronous semantics and the interleaved semantics. We provide a symbolic algorithm for the verification of LTLK over models of multi-agent systems and evaluate its implementation against MCK, a competing model checker for knowledge. Our evaluation indicates that the interleaved semantics can often be preferable in the verification of LTLK

Infant mortality and social causality: Lessons from the history of Britain’s public health movement, c. 1834–1914

What are the historical conditions under which a sociologically informed understanding of health inequality can emerge in the public sphere? We seek to address this question through the lens of a strategically chosen historical puzzle—the stubborn persistence of and salient variation in high infant mortality rates across British industrial towns at the dawn of the previous century—as analysed by Arthur Newsholme, the Medical Officer of the Local Government Board. In doing so, we retrace the historical processes through which the evolving public health movement gradually helped crystallise a scientific understanding of the social causes of excess mortality. We map the dominant ideology of the public sphere at the time, chart the shifting roles of the state, and retrace the historical origins and emergence of ‘public health’ as a distinctive category of state policy and public discourse. We situate the public health movement in this historical configuration and identify the cracks in the existing ideological and administrative edifice through which this movement was able to articulate a novel approach to population health—one that spotlights the political economy of social inequality. We relate this historical sequence to the rise of industrial capitalism, the social fractures that it spawned, and the organised counter‐movements that it necessitated