Hayek’s Nobel

The paper offers a number of vignettes surrounding Friedrich A. Hayek’s receipt of the Nobel Prize. It examines Hayek’s life before he got the prize, describes the events in Stockholm, and offers a summary of the main themes of his Prize Lecture. It then examines the subsequent impact on Hayek’s life and career. It concludes by looking at the impact of the Prize on scholarship about Hayek and the Austrian movement

George Soros: Hayekian?

The title is intentionally provocative. In his 2010 book The Soros Lectures at the Central European University, George Soros wrote that the Austrian Nobel laureate Friedrich A. Hayek ‘became an apostle of the Chicago School of Economics, where market fundamentalism originated’ Given that Soros has long been a severe critic of market fundamentalism, it would seem that Hayek and he must be on opposite ends of the spectrum. For precursors, Soros looks to economists such as J.M. Keynes and Frank Knight, to the sociologist Robert Merton, and to the philosopher Karl Popper, all of whose writings in various ways anticipated certain key Sorosian ideas. In the first two sections of this paper, I will show that in fact F.A. Hayek and George Soros share many views in common, some of them ontological (having to do with the nature of reality) and others methodological (having to do with the appropriate way to study and represent economic phenomena). I will then point out some differences between them, though we will see that, even here, they are closer than one might initially expect. If at the end of the day George Soros still rejects the label of Hayekian, perhaps he will not mind if we instead describe Hayek as an ontological and methodological Sorosian, avant la letter

Study Of Water Use And Environmental Aspects Of Rice Growing

The Council of Australian Governments (COAG) has agreed to a nationwide approach to water reform. The outcomes of the reform process are already having an impact on irrigation and ricegrowing and further impacts can be expected. Such changes should affect the direction of some of the future research to be undertaken by the Co-operative Research Centre for Sustainable Rice Production. The long-term sustainability of irrigation systems in arid zones has been shown, world wide, to have technical difficulties. As ricegrowing in arid zones is absolutely dependent on irrigation it is obvious the eventual sustainability of rice is inextricably linked to the sustainability of the irrigation systems as a whole. If irrigation systems start to fail for whatever reason (e.g. environmental degradation, water allocated to other purposes) then ricegrowing will decline. It is recognised that ricegrowing, as an irrigation activity, contributes to the environmental problems associated with irrigation. It is thus of fundamental importance to have a full understanding of this aspect of ricegrowing. It is also important that current rice farming practices and research efforts are adequately addressing such issues. This study examines the extent of ricegrowing as the predominant irrigation activity in the Murrumbidgee and Murray Valleys of New South Wales. Past and current policies of governments are reviewed in relation to access to water for irrigation and its use for ricegrowing. Data has been compiled on rice production, water availability, water use, ground watertables and salinity as these relate to the rice industry

Gender and health in Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka has today easily the longest life-expectancy of any nation in South Asia. The country's achievements have been particularly impressive in the health of women and girls who have substantially lower mortality levels than males; this is unexceptional in the developed world where it is the norm but striking in South Asia where it is not. It has been suggested that low female mortality may reflect a high involvement of Sri Lankan women in decision-making over health care and feeding practices which has benefited their health and that of their children, especially their daughters. Yet census data indicate that until recent decades overall mortality levels were little lower than in other South Asian countries and female age-specific mortality rates were higher than male rates. The paper explores the issues involved concluding that the autonomy of women has contributed to the decline of overall mortality, once modern health services developed. However, women's autonomy has not in itself overcome the sex differential in care, given the economic dependence of women and their families on males: husbands while the women are raising children and ultimately sons for old-age support

Student Involvement in Campus OER Movements: Creating and Sustaining an SGA Open Education Award

Presentation at OpenEd 2018, Niagara Falls, NY. October 10-12, 2018.A presentation describe the design and implementation of a Student Government Open Educational Resources Teaching Award for faculty at Texas A&M University and the University of Tennessee.OpenEd 201

Marriage in Sri Lanka : a century of change

The study is concerned with the determinants of marriage patterns in Sri Lanka. Female age at marriage has been rising since censuses began recording it in 1901, until now Sri Lanka has easily the latest marriage age in South Asia. Sri Lanka's late marriage age has been attributed to an economic and social context where incomes are low and unemployment is high, and where young couples usually establish an independent household sometime after marriage. Reduced access to land, as a result of population growth and rising expectations, has meant that it is increasingly difficult for the young couple to raise the resources to marry. It has also been noted that a shortage of grooms in the marriage market may specifically have encouraged a later female marriage age. While these factors are important they do not adequately explain long-term changes in marriage patterns; for this it is necessary to examine these changes within the total context of changes in marriage. The most important such change has been a decline in arranged marriage and its replacement by self-selection in marriage. Arranged marriage has declined because marriage itself has changed in response to the increasing individualization of society. Marriage, and the rights and responsibilities that go with it, in the past involved not simply two individuals but also their families and even the wider community. Marriage reflected a society in which an individual's status depended upon his membership of a wider group, generally based on kinship, the most important of which was the family. A marriage concerned all family members for it imposed obligations and, in return, gave rights for the families as well as the individuals marrying; for example, it might involve dowry, or influence the inheritance of family property, or create a useful alliance with another family. It also had implications for family status; it was important for instance that the individual came from a suitable family or caste. For the young to have disputed the family's right to be involved in the marriage would have been to dispute their place in the family. This family-based society no longer holds. A new economic system has emerged which places a much greater emphasis on individual attributes, and in which achieved status counts for more than ascribed status. The family is much less important. Therefore, the members of the family place less pressure on other family members to behave according to the interests of the family as a whole. This applies, in particular, to the arrangement of marriage; the family members have less interest in arranging a marriage as its consequences matter less to them, and the young have less interest in having their marriages arranged, because what they gain in return is of less value. The increasing individualization of society has also affected marriage patterns. In the past, the ties established by marriage were vital for an individual to be a functioning adult in society. The only role outside marriage was that of the monk, which was essentially available only for males. Marriage now is less a matter of establishing social ties and more restricted to forming a unit for raising children. Marriage is, consequently, less essential than before, and hence celibacy is more possible. The changes also mean that early marriage is less advantageous than previously. Where family considerations dominated over individual considerations the advantages of early marriage were greater than the disadvantages. For the family early marriage has certain advantages, ties with other families can be established earlier, the risk of an elopement is less, a younger bride is often more accepting of family authority, while there are few disadvantages; emphasis was placed on family attributes including family status, caste and property, all of which were independent of the age of the individual. For the individual too, the earlier they married the sooner they were accepted into full adult status. Now, however, that the family is less important, the advantages of early marriage for it are less relevant, while the advantages of later marriage are increasing. Most importantly, more emphasis is being placed on individual attributes, many of which, such as education, employment and especially experience and maturity, take time to accumulate, and thus encourage a later age at marriage. In comparison to the rest of South Asia Sri Lanka's age at marriage was always somewhat later because pressures for very early marriage were never as strong; differences in family and kinship structure, in caste, and in the strength of the local community meant that early marriage was always less advantageous in Sri Lanka

The jajmani system : an investigation

The idea for this thesis developed as a result of work I undertook as a research assistant on a demographic survey in India. During an initial visit in 1978-9, I became interested in the effects of occupational and educational change on caste, on which subject I subsequently wrote my honours thesis, Stablility and Challenge: Caste Responses to Changes in Occupation and Education in an Indian Village. While reading for this subject I became interested in the concept of the jajmani system. As described in the anthropological literature, jajmani is a system whereby the services of a range of craftsmen, which may include barbers, washermen, carpenters, and blacksmiths, are provided in return for fixed annual allocations of harvested grain rather than for payment in money or payment for each service tailored to the size of the service. The services are provided only by the appropriate castes and may include other specified ritual duties. Jajmani relations have been identified as being hereditary and as involving duties and responsibilities on the parts of those giving and those receiving the service. The literature on the jajmani relations interested me but did not seem to describe the relationships I had noted in the field. During my next visit in 1979-80, I was determined to explore this matter but at first I made little progress. I asked the chief landlords of the village in which I was working, Mayasandra, in Karnataka State, South India, whether they made the annual payments of grain to their labourers that anthropologists held to characterize the jajmani system. They uniformly said that they did not but paid their labourers in cash, usually on a purely casual basis. Conversations I had with the labourers reinforced this information. It was only when I had cross-questioned a much wider range of people, that I found that harvest payments were made, but only by the smaller farmers of Mayasandra and in the outlying hamlets. They were paid not to the labourers, but only to the so-called service castes, the Barbers, Washermen, Blacksmiths etc. (When an occupation is spelled with an initial capital letter it designates the caste which traditionally undertook that work.) On rereading the literature, I found that I had made several unwarranted assumptions. Firstly, although theoretical models of the jajmani system generally cover all occupational groups (see Wiser, 1958; Dumont, 1980), most ethnographic descriptions (including Wiser’s) only mention the service castes, and the few exceptions are highly suspect

F. A. Hayek and the economic calculus

The paper offers a revisionist account of certain episodes in the development of F. A. Hayek's thought. It offers a new reading of his 1937 paper, "Economics and Knowledge," that draws on unpublished lecture notes in which he articulated more fully the distinctions he made in the paper between a "pure logic of choice," or the economic calculus, and an "empirical element," which he would later call the competitive market order. Next, the paper shows that Hayek continued to try to develop his ideas about the role of the economic calculus through the 1950s and early 1960s, an effort that has been missed because it never led to any published work. Finally, the paper examines Hayek's attempt to articulate a theory of the market process, one that would be at the same level of generality as the economic calculus, in lectures he gave at the University of Virginia. He never developed a full-fledged formal theory, but his failed efforts still bore fruit in leading him to his contributions on spontaneous orders and the (verbal) theory of complex phenomena. This work anticipated contributions by others who were more technically trained

Maximally Symmetric Spin-Two Bitensors on S3S^3 and H3H^3

The transverse traceless spin-two tensor harmonics on $S^3$ and $H^3$ may be denoted by $T^{(kl)}{}_{ab}$. The index $k$ labels the (degenerate) eigenvalues of the Laplacian $\square$ and $l$ the other indices. We compute the bitensor $\sum_l T^{(kl)}{}_{ab}(x) T^{(kl)}{}_{a'b'}(x')^*$ where $x,x'$ are distinct points on a sphere or hyperboloid of unit radius. These quantities may be used to find the correlation function of a stochastic background of gravitational waves in spatially open or closed Friedman-Robertson-Walker cosmologies.Comment: 12 pages, RevTeX, uuencoded compressed .tex file, minor typos correcte