Normative Objectives Research Articles

The value of perfect information in nonlinear utility theory

Wakker (1988) has recently shown that, in contrast to an expected utility maximizer, the value of information will sometimes be negative for an agent who violates the independence axiom of expected utility theory. We demonstrate, however, that the value ofperfect information will always be nonnegative if the agent satisfies a weak dominance axiom. This result thus mitigates to some degree the normative objection to nonlinear utility theory implicit in Wakker's finding.

Planning for Industrial Decline: Lessons from Steel Communities

Economic development planning has weaker tools than does land use planning and is hampered by a great deal of analytical and normative conflict. This paper reviews the causes and remedies of industrial decline in the steel industry. At least eight different causal explanations of steel job loss have been offered, and diverse normative objectives have been invoked. This research exam ines the intergovernmental issues and the politics involved in a num ber of innovative steel strategies. The paper concludes that this type of controversy is bound to escalate in the coming decades. Therefore, economic development planners will need a broad education in both po litical economy and institutional and intergovernmental settings, as well as improved skills in conceptualizing and testing causal models of indus try evolution.

Price as the Cost-Benefit Norm

Planned pricing is one of the basic elements of the economic mechanism. Under the new conditions of economic development, price must become an objective economic norm that ensures the manufacturer's interests in the production process and the customer's interests during the operation of highly effective machinery. The special attention of economists and those involved in operations is attracted by the problem of pricing fundamentally new machinery. Of late, there have been efforts to improve the prices on new machinery.

Sports and women's culture

This article focuses on the fact that women and men belong to two different cultures. Concerning sport participation, there exists a double standard in the way girls and boys are socialized into sport. As a result, sport has never played an important part in many women's lives. This is illustrated by data from different empirical studies that have been done in Norway during recent years. In discussing the future development of women's sport, three approaches are discussed: (1) when women become more and more like men, (2) when women preserve and develop what has been defined as typical female characteristics and activities, and (3) when the androgynous person becomes the normative objective. The author demonstrates that the development so far is the one mentioned in the first point. This is equality on men's terms. The advantage of such a development is questioned. The ideology of society today, which also is reflected in the world of sport, has to be changed. As a consequence, sport should be humanized. It is therefore necessary that women and the central values in women's culture become a strong influence on the development of sport.

A Comparison of Subjective and Objective Sperm Motility Evaluation

A series of semen samples that had been recorded on motion picture film, then evaluated via standard visual techniques by a number of well established fertility clinics (Van Duijn et al (1971)), was analyzed frame‐by‐frame for sperm motility ratings with the aid of a movie reader‐computer image analysis system. Results of the latter analysis were considered an objective norm. Statistical comparison of the subjective and objective sets of data revealed that sperm % motility could be subjectively rated with reasonable accuracy when the percentage of sperm moving progressively at least 30 μm/second−2 was outside the range of 34–57. Within this range, however, there is a better than 93% chance for an erroneous subjective assessment. When the results of the computer method were compared with those of the spectrophotometric method of Atherton (1975), a poor correlation was obtained, indicating that if the latter method is an accurate measure of motility, it does not discriminate progressive motility.

Report on Individualized Reporting

In recent years there has been a tendency to substitute a system of marking on the basis of the child's ability for the more conventional system of marking on the basis of class standards or standardized norms (10). Under individualized marking, as the approach is called, a child is evaluated, not on the basis of some objective norm, but on the basis of the type of classwork he produces in relation to his ability. This relativistic approach to evaluating pupil achievement is an outgrowth of findings of psychological studies concerned with individual differences in mental ability. The approach assumes that it is impossible for all pupils to attain certain levels of development at the same time. Proceeding from this assumption, advocates of individualized reporting maintain that this approach is more conducive to the child's social, emotional, moral, and academic development. Supporters of the approach further contend that it has advantages for all pupils-the slow, the average, and the gifted. The slow pupil, competing with himself, no longer has the im-

Kierkegaard and the “Existential” Philosophy

It is a wise child who knows his own father; and the climate of thought of a generation may be subtly changed without conscious recognition of the formative minds which have been, if not the parents, at least the godparents of that change. That is to say, they have sponsored the baptism of ideas which would only be safe so long as they renounced the world, the flesh, and the devil; but, as is so often the case, when the offspring grow up they form a pact with those very powers. To make Søren Kierkegaard spiritually responsible for the present war would have as little, and perhaps as much, truth in it as the facile explanations which made Hegel responsible for the last one. But it is part of the demonism of policies of power and ambition to be able to pervert to their own ends religious ideas which in their intention are a protest against those very ambitions; and, by so doing, to win a response from people who, in a dim, unconscious way, are feeling after the ideas themselves, but have neither the powers of self-criticism nor of radical thinking to resist travesties of them which appear to justify their own self-assertion. When Hitler informed Sir Nevile Henderson that he was a man of “ad infinitum decisions” we may question the extent of his knowledge either of the Latin language or of the existential philosophy; but the phrase awakes an echo of the religious philosophy of circles far removed from National-Socialism. Both Nazi apologists and their Confessional or independent opponents are consciously or unconsciously moved by a way of thinking which puts the decision of the individual, made in the concrete moment, above any objective or universal norm of ethics or of reason by which it can be either justified or criticized.