These documents, published here for the first time, present the Treasury's counter-arguments during the period when Keynes was developing the ideas that led to the Keynesian revolution in economic policy. Keynes spent much effort trying to persuade the Treasury to adopt policies designed to raise employment and stabilise prices, and to create an international monetary system that would favour these objectives. His arguments are set out fully in the Royal Economic Society's 30-volume set of The Collected Writings of John Maynard (...) Keynes. In contrast, the views of his Treasury critics have hitherto been much less accessible.Economists and historians have tended to assume that Keynes was right and the Treasury was wrong; this volume shows that the Treasury anticipated the political problems that would be encountered in putting Keynes's ideas into practice. Much of what Keynes published was deliberately polemical: he believed that words should be 'a little wild', for they were 'the assault of thought on the unthinking'. Treasury officials were by no means as unthinking as Keynes tended to portray them, and they had a coherent and intellectually respectable understanding of public finance. Ministers in the inter-war period and early in the Second World War were sensitive to the use that political opponents might make of Keynes's arguments; officials had to provide counter-arguments, and in doing so they revealed much about their views on economics and public finance. Once Keynes became an adviser to the Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1940, the debate became internal to the Treasury, but officials continued to subject Keynes's ideas to critical analysis.The documents in this volume show Treasury responses to Keynes on a range of issues crucial to understanding the period and the context of the Keynesian revolution in public policy. The topics covered include: the return to the gold standard; the use of public expenditure to cure unemployment in the inter-war period; how to avoid inflation in the war; planning for the post-war international economy; and the 1944 white paper on employment policy. This edition is an essential tool for the study of a formative period of British history and a great intellectual debate. (shrink)

One of Hume's most well-known works and a masterpiece of philosophy, A Treatise of Human Nature is indubitably worth taking the time to read.

SummaryIntense, sustained nursing lengthens inter-birth intervals and is causally linked with low natural fertility. However, in traditional settings, the effects of such nursing on fertility are difficult to disentangle from those of nutrition. Results from an prospective, direct observational study of reproductive function in well-nourished Amele women who nurse intensively and persistently but who also have high fertility are here presented. Endocrine measures show that ovarian activity resumes by median 11·0 months postpartum. Median duration of postpartum amenorrhoea is 11·3 months, (...) time to next conception is 19·0 months, and the inter-birth interval is 28·0 months. Average life time fertility is 6·8. High fertility in Amele women is due both to refractoriness of reproductive function to suckling stimuli, and to maintenance of equivalent age-specific fertility rates across the reproductive life span. (shrink)

This 1992 book examines alternative methods for achieving optimality without all the apparatus of economic planning, or a vain reliance on sufficiently 'perfect' competition. All rely entirely on the self-interest of economic agents and voluntary contract. The author considers methods involving feedback iterative controls which require the prior selection of a 'criterion function', but no prior calculation of optimal quantities. The target is adjusted as the results for each step become data for the criterion function. Implementation is built in by (...) the incentive structure, and all controls rely on consistency with the self-interest of individuals. The applicability of all the methods is shown to be independent of the form of ownership of enterprises: examples are given for industries which are wholly privately owned, wholly nationalized, mixed and labour-managed. (shrink)

According to the prevailing sentiment, changing the past is logically impossible. The prevailing sentiment is wrong. In this paper, I argue that the claim that changing the past entails a contradiction ultimately rests upon an empirical assumption, and so the conclusion that changing the past is logically impossible is to be resisted. I then present and discuss a model of time which drops the empirical assumption and coherently models changing the past. Finally, I defend the model, and changing the past, (...) against objections. (shrink)

Some philosophers argue that any attempt to model changing the past will either be contradictory or really model avoiding the past. Using Nicholas Smith's (1997) argument as a basis, I formulate a generic version of this Avoidance Argument. I argue that the Avoidance Argument fails because (i) it involves an equivocation of what is meant by ‘bifurcation of the time of an event’ and (ii) resolving the equivocation results in the falsity of at least one of the premises. Hence, the (...) Avoidance Argument will not support the claim that changing the past is logically impossible. (shrink)

The method of interpreting political theory in relation to its specific historical contexts offers particular insight into the work of Karl Marx. When pre-capitalist societies are understood in relation to Marx's rigorously conceived capitalist mode of production, it is apparent that the context in which Marx produced his very earliest work was itself pre-capitalist. It can then be recognized that Marx began by making a significant contribution to an existing framework of critical political theory but also that, following a critical (...) confrontation with English political economy in 1844, he opened new avenues of thought in relation to a new context: capitalism. (shrink)

Quantum mechanics, which describes the behavior of subatomic particles, seems to challenge common sense. Waves behave like particles; particles behave like waves. You can tell where a particle is, but not how fast it is moving--or vice versa. An electron faced with two tiny holes will travel through both at the same time, rather than one or the other. And then there is the enigma of creation ex nihilo, in which small particles appear with their so-called antiparticles, only to disappear (...) the next instant in a tiny puff of energy. Since its inception, physicists and philosophers have struggled to work out the meaning of quantum mechanics. Some, like Niels Bohr, have responded to quantum mechanics' mysteries by replacing notions of position and velocity with probabilities. Others, like Einstein and Penrose, have disagreed and think that the entire puzzle reflects not a fundamental principle of nature but our own ignorance of basic scientific processes. Sneaking a Look at God's Cards offers the general reader a deep and real understanding of the problems inherent to the interpretation of quantum mechanics, from its inception to the present. The book presents a balanced overview of current debates and explores how the theory of quantum mechanics plays itself out in the real world. Written from the perspective of a leading European physicist, the book looks extensively at ideas from both sides of the Atlantic and also considers what philosophers have contributed to the scientific discussion of this field. Sneaking a Look at God's Cards sets out what we know about the endlessly fascinating quantum world, how we came to this understanding, where we disagree, and where we are heading in our quest to comprehend the seemingly incomprehensible. (shrink)

G. C. J. Midgley; XIV—Linguistic Rules, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 59, Issue 1, 1 June 1959, Pages 271–290, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristot.

We apply the distinction between parameter independence and outcome independence to the linear and nonlinear models of a recent nonrelativistic theory of continuous state vector reduction. We show that in the nonlinear model there is a set of realizations of the stochastic process that drives the state vector reduction for which parameter independence is violated for parallel spin components in the EPR-Bohm setup. Such a set has an appreciable probability of occurrence (≈ 1/2). On the other hand, the linear model (...) exhibits only extremely small parameter dependence effects. We investigate some specific features of the models and we recall that, as has been pointed out recently, if one wants to be able to speak of definite outcomes (or equivalently of possessed objective elements of reality) at finite times, one has to slightly change the criteria for their attribution to physical systems. The concluding section is devoted to a detailed discussion of the difficulties which one meets when one tries to take, as a starting point for the formulation of a relativistic theory, a nonrelativistic scheme which exhibits parameter dependence. Here we derive a theorem which identifies the precise sense in which the occurrence of parameter dependence forbids a genuinely relativistic generalization. Finally we show how the appreciable parameter dependence of the nonlinear model gives rise to problems with relativity, while the extremely weak parameter dependence of the linear model does not give rise to any difficulty, provided one takes into account the appropriate criteria for the attribution of definite outcomes. (shrink)