Error minimization and deterrence in agency control

In the presented oversight model, in which a regulatory agency may collude with regulatees, a watchdog organization may scrutinize the agency’s decision-making and find evidence speaking for collusive behavior. Found evidence is of a specific, stochastic quality. Courts will overturn the administrative decision when the evidence presented in court exceeds a minimum quality standard set by the political principal. Lowering the quality standard increases the odds of finding evidence of sufficient quality and, hence, leads to increasing collusion deterrence and to a lower probability of acquitting collusive administrators (type I error), but also to a higher probability of convicting an innocent administrator (type II error). It is shown that, when welfare-maximization gives rise to an interior solution, the welfare-maximizing standard of evidence is lower than the one that merely minimizes the costs of legal errors without taking deterrence costs into account, but will imply incomplete deterrence. However, conditions can and will be identified under which both error cost minimization and complete deterrence coincide with welfare-maximization.     

Public choice and political philosophy: Reflections on the works of Gordon Spinoza and David Immanuel Buchanan

The paper explores some of the surprisingly many relations between theories of public choice and political philosophy. Focusing on variants of Homo oeconomicus it does so systematically rather than historically. But it factors in the history of the two disciplines along with some recent developments in (experimental) economics. This sheds new light on the counterfactual assumption that in politics everybody should be supposed to be a knave and suggests that we better seek factually sound behavioral foundations for Public Choice.     

Peace education,militarism and neo-liberalism: conceptual reflections with empirical findings from the UK

This article explores ‘peace days’ in English schools as a form of peace education. From a historical overview of academic discussions on peace education in the US and Great Britain since the First World War, we identify three key factors important for peace education: the political context, the place in which peace days occur and pedagogical imperatives of providing a certain narrative of the sources of violence in politics. Although contemporary militarism and neoliberalism reduce the terrains for peace studies in English schools, peace days allow teachers to carve out spaces for peace education. Peace days in Benfield School, Newcastle and Comberton Village College, Cambridgeshire, are considered as case studies. We conclude with reflections on the opportunities and limitations of this approach to peace education, and on how peace educators and activists could enlarge its reach.     

The calculus of consent after thirty years

It is shown that the basic normative argument of thecalculus is moored to a collectivistic unanimity norm. As most scholars working in the field of public choice, including the authors of the seminalcalculus, would otherwise reject collectivistic normative premises, a re-interpretation of the status of the unanimity principle of thecalculus seems unavoidable. The paper argues that this can be done if the basic formation of a society is not characterized as starting from a given set of individuals but rather in terms of the formation of clubs. This amounts to the same thing as substituting universalistic ethical premises by particularistic ones which are more in line with standard economic methodology.     

The trajectory of the Cuban revolution

René Dumont, Cuba est‐il Socialiste?, Paris, Seuil, 1970. 246 pp., Sw. Fr. 6.50. Richard R. Fagen, The Transformation of Political Culture in Cuba, Stanford U.P., 1969. ix+271 pp., $8.50 (£4). Michel Gutelman, L'Agriculture Socialisée à Cuba, Paris, Maspéro, 1967, 229 pp., Fr. 18.80. K. S. Karol, Les Guerrilléros au Pouvoir: l'itinéraire politique de la révolution cubaine, Paris, Robert Laffont, 1970. 606 pp., Sw. Fr. 31.30 (to be published in English by Hill and Wang, New York, as Guerillas in Power: the Course of the Cuban Revolution). James O'Connor, The Origins of Socialism in Cuba, Ithaca and London, Cornell U.P., 1970. viii+338 pp., $10 (£4.75).     

Productivity,employment and labor demand in Polish industry in the 1980s: Some preliminary results from enterprise-level data

The paper uses annual data from a panel of 334 Polish industrial enterprises over the period 1983–1988 to test empirically a simple neoclassical approach to the socialist labor market. First, an enterprise production function is estimated. The paper finds that for most enterprises, the resulting estimated marginal product of labor exceeds the wage paid by the enterprise by a considerable margin, suggesting general excess demand for labor. The paper then looks at how the difference between the MPL and the wage is related to the rate of change of employment, and finds that firms where the MPL is higher than the wage — firms which in a neoclassical model would have a large excess demand for labor — do not shed labor any more slowly than other firms.