Laissez-Faire Versus Pareto

Consider two principles for social evaluation. The first, ‘laissez-faire’, says that mean-preserving redistribution away from laissez-faire incomes should be regarded as a social worsening. This principle captures a key aspect of liberal political philosophy. The second, weak Pareto, states that an increase in each individual’s disposable income should be regarded as a social improvement. We show that the combination of the two principles implies that total disposable income ought be maximized. Strikingly, the relationship between disposable incomes and laissez-faire incomes must therefore be ignored, leaving little room for liberal values

Disposable carrier for retrograde fillings

Commercially available retrograde filling carriers are delicate and easily damaged by pressure. In addition, they are difficult to clean and keep free from blockage. This report describes a simple and easy technique for transforming a standard disposable hypodermic syringe and needle into a disposable carrier for retrograde fillings. {\^A}{\copyright} 2006 Asian Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons

Permanent Objects, Disposable Systems

4th International Conference on Open RepositoriesThis presentation was part of the session : Conference PresentationsDate: 2009-05-19 01:00 PM – 02:30 PMThe California Digital Library (CDL) preservation program is re-envisioning its curation infrastructure as a set of loosely-coupled, distributed micro-services. There are many monolithic systems that support a range of preservation activities but also require the user and the hosting institution to buy-in to a particular system culture. The result is an institution that becomes, say, a DSpace, Fedora, or LOCKSS "shop", with a specific worldview and set of object flows and structures that will eventually need to be abandoned when it comes time to transition to the next system. Experience shows that these transitions are unavoidable, despite claims that once an object is in the system, it will be safe forever. In view of this it is safer and more cost-effective to acknowledge from the outset the inevitable transient nature of systems and to plan on managing, rather than resisting change. The disruption caused by change can be mitigated by basing curation services on simple universal structures and protocols (e.g., filesystems, HTTP) and micro-services that operate on them. We promote a "mix and match" approach in which appropriate content- and context-specific curation workflows can be nimbly constructed by combining necessary functions drawn from a granular set of independent micro-services. Micro-services, whether deployed in isolation or in combination, are especially suited to exploitation upstream towards content creators who normally don't want to think about preservation, especially if it's costly; compared to buying into an entire curation culture, it is easy to adopt a small, inexpensive tool that requires very little commitment. We see digital curation as an ongoing process of enrichment at all stages in the lifecycle of a digital object. Because the early developmental stages are so critical to an object's health and longevity, it is desirable to push curation "best practices" as far upstream towards the object creators as possible. If preservation is considered only when objects are close to retirement, it is often too late to correct the structural and semantic deficiencies that can impair object usability. The later the intervention, the more expensive the correction process, and it is always difficult to fund interventions for "has been" objects. In contrast, early stage curation challenges traditional practices. Traditionally, preservation actions are often based on end-stage processing, where objects are deposited "as is" and kept out of harm's way by limiting access (i.e., dark archives). While some systems are designed to be dark or "dim", with limited access and little regard for versioning or object enrichment, enrichment and access are now seen as necessary curation actions, that is, interventions for the sake of preservation. In particular, the darkness of an entire collection can change in the blink of an eye, for example, as the result of a court ruling or access rights purchase; turning the lights on for a collection should be as simple as throwing a switch, and not require transferring the collection from a "preservation repository" to an "access repository". Effective curation services must be flexible and easily configurable in order to respond appropriately to the wide diversity of content and content uses. To be most effective, not only should curation practices be pushed upstream but also they should be pushed out to many different contexts. The micro-services approach promotes the idea that curation is an outcome, not a place. Curation actions should be applied to content where it most usefully exists for the convenience of its creators or users. For example, high value digital assets in access repositories, or even scholars' desktops, would certainly benefit from such things as persistent identification or regular audits to discover and repair bit-level damage, functions usually available only in the context of a "preservation system" but now easily applied to content where it most usefully resides without requiring transfer to a central location

Estimates of the demand for US consumer borrowings

This paper explains non-mortgage borrowing by U.S. households with demand-side factors, viz. disposable income, wealth and interest rate. The life cycle hypothesis and a standard two period consumption model are the basis of our theoretical model. We find with the cointegration techniques that current disposable income, past wealth, and interest rate explain consumer borrowing over 50 years.consumer borrowing, disposable income, wealth, interest rates, US economy

Reducing Disposable Bag Use

Plastic shopping bags were introduced to the consumer market about 25 years ago. Since then, they’ve become-literally-a ubiquitous part of the American landscape. Every year, between 500 billion and one trillion disposable plastic shopping bags are consumed worldwide. In the United States, 100 billion plastic bags are used each year, costing retailers $4 billion, which is passed on to the consumer in the price of goods

Metropolitan Area Disposable Personal Income - Methodology and Results for 2001-2007

The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) publishes annual statistics of state disposable personal income, the difference between state personal income and state personal current taxes. BEA also publishes annual statistics of personal income for sub-state areas, but BEA does not publish corresponding statistics of disposable personal income (DPI) due to the absence of sub-state statistics of personal current taxes. This paper expands on earlier work to present new statistics of disposable personal income for 2005-2007 for the current 366 metropolitan areas.

Disposable Workforce in Italy

This paper explores the “disposable” patterns of workforce utilization in Italy. The term “disposable” reflects the fact that people enter the labor market, their services are “used” as a disposable commodity for few years, after which they leave the labor market and are no longer observable in the official data. Out of 100 new young entries, only 70 are still in the labor market 10 years after entry if their first job spell was at least one year long. For those – three times as many - whose first job is short (youth employment, unemployment, unemployment duration.

Metropolitan Area Disposable Personal Income: Methodology and Results for 2001-2004

The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) publishes annual estimates of state disposable personal income, the difference between state personal income and state personal current taxes. BEA also publishes annual estimates of personal income for sub-state areas, but BEA does not publish corresponding estimates of disposable personal income (DPI) due to the absence of estimates of taxes. This paper uses the methodology presented in an earlier working paper to revise and update the estimates of disposable personal income for the current 363 metropolitan statistical areas for 2001-2004.

"Inequality of the Distribution of Personal Wealth in Germany 1973 - 1998"

This paper reports on trends in inequality of the distribution of household disposable wealth in West Germany from 1973 to 1998, and compares the changes in the size distribution of household disposable wealth in West and East Germany between 1993 and 1998. The empirical findings are based on several cross sections of the Income and Consumption Survey (ICS), which is conducted every five years by the German Federal Statistical Office. Since these surveys are large quota samples that exclude the very rich, the institutionalized population, and -- until 1993 -- foreign households, as well as equity in private businesses, the inequality measures derived can be considered the lower bounds of the estimates of their true values. The Gini coefficients for disposable household wealth are about double the coefficients for household disposable income and about three times the coefficients for equivalent disposable income of persons. Except for 1998, net financial assets are less unequally distributed than total disposable wealth but net housing wealth is distributed more unequally. We find a slight decrease in the inequality of disposable household wealth between 1973 and 1993, followed by a slight increase until 1998. We also find the well-known hump shape of relative average wealth holdings of age groups, but by looking at the same birth cohorts in the consecutive cross-section samples we can show that the relative position of the two oldest birth cohorts deteriorates only slightly in old age. If one changes the perspective to disposable wealth per household member, one finds that there is only a slight decrease of the relative wealth position but no reduction in the absolute levels of disposable wealth. This is contrary to the predictions of the life cycle model. Bequests between spouses and composition effects can be reasons for this surprising result. Looking at inequality within household age groups, we see a consistent pattern of highest inequality among the youngest age group that decreases until retirement age, and then increases again. This points to inheritances and gifts inter vivo even at young age. Comparing West to East Germany, we find greater inequality of the wealth distribution in East Germany but lower inequality of the distribution of disposable income of households and of equivalent income of persons. We also see a strong tendency to a convergence in the distributions of wealth and income between West and East Germany. Closing the gap in GDP per capita between West and East Germany leads to increasing inequality of income but decreasing inequality of wealth in East Germany.

Bread, peace and the attrition of power: Economic events and German election results

Aggregate votes for incumbent parties in post-war Germany were determined by the weighted-average growth of real per capita disposable income. Each percentage point of per capita real disposable income growth sustained over the legislative term yielded approximately two percentage points of votes in Germany. No other economic variables add value or significantly perturb the coefficients of our model. However, attrition of power reduced the vote share in election years 1961, 1994 and 1998. --bread and peace model,elections,vote share,real per capita disposable income growth