Further reflections on the ontology of money: responses to Lapavitsas and Dodd

Abstract

The debate on the nature of money, its origins and conditions of existence has been recently taken further in separate articles in Economy and Society by Lapavitsas and Dodd. Both criticize Ingham's elaboration of Keynes's contention that the money of account is the primary concept in a theory of money. Lapavitisas reiterates and extends his Marxist analysis of money's origins as a universal equivalent in commodity exchange. This fails to explain the existence of a money of account, without which genuinely market exchange cannot take place. Dodd's claim to furnish a much-needed analytical refinement in the analysis of money, used to criticize Ingham's position, is shown to be based on a re-statement of an established and widely accepted distinction in monetary theory.     

An empirical estimate of the precision of likelihood ratios from a forensic-voice-comparison system

An acoustic-phonetic forensic-voice-comparison system was constructed using the time-averaged formant values of tokens of 61 male Chinese speakers' /i/, /e/, and /a/ monophthongs as input. Likelihood ratios were calculated using a multivariate kernel density formula. A separate set of likelihood ratios was calculated for each vowel phoneme, and these were then fused and calibrated using linear logistic regression. The system was tested via cross-validation. The validity and reliability of the results were assessed using the log-likelihood-ratio-cost function (C(llr), a measure of accuracy) and an empirical estimate of the credible interval for the likelihood ratios from different-speaker comparisons (a measure of precision). The credible interval was calculated on the basis of two independent pairs of samples for each different-speaker comparison pair.     

The implications of differences between employer and worker employment/earnings reports for policy evaluation

Differences in administrative (UI) and survey (S) records on employment and earnings have substantial implications for assessing the impact of a variety of public interventions, such as welfare‐to‐work and employment training programs, and especially the state‐oriented welfare reform legislation of 1996. We use data from the 1998 and 1999 waves of the Child Support Demonstration Evaluation (CSDE) Resident Parent Surveys to explore individual differences between survey and UI employment and earnings reports for a Wisconsin sample of current and former welfare recipients. After exploring the potential causes of misreports from both sources, we document the degree of discrepancy between survey and UI earnings and employment measures and assess the difference between the two earnings measures in estimates of simple human capital (earnings) functions. Last, we evaluate the correspondence of the two measures with “hardship” indicators of economic well‐being.     

Challenges in Implementing Justice Research in the Allocation of Natural Resources

Water reform in Australia has demanded that water usage for irrigation operates in an environmentally sustainable manner. It has resulted in the need to reduce allocations in some local communities, and to date government policy has relied on economic instruments to take the lead in developing equitable processes to do this. A series of community-based justice studies were undertaken and demonstrated that it is possible to derive a package of actions, which reflect the fairness judgments of the vast majority of the community. However, the implementation of these actions within the decision-making process has proven to be a more complex matter. This paper discusses four professional, methodological, and ethical challenges for all justice researchers. It concludes by noting the applicability of this form of research in other natural resource allocation dilemmas. Therefore it is imperative that justice researchers confidently insert themselves in to environmental policy debates. Only in this way will the social criteria for triple bottom line accounting for sustainable development be adequately represented.