Simple Exposition Research Articles

Selected Essays by Viacheslav Ivanov , Michael Wachtel , Robert Bird (review)

MLR, ioi.i, 2006 305 Mandelker's 'Teaching Anna Karenina' points to the challenges and difficulties of teaching this novel in the twenty-firstcentury: 'Those of us who teach the novel regularly find that it persistently detonates heated classroom debates of issues that continue to be topical: sex and sexuality, gender roles, social constriction of indivi? dual self-expression and fulfilment' and so on (p. 3). At the same time, she continues, students nowadays wonder why Anna did not just get divorced, while also objecting to Tolstoy's didactic moralizing. Her account of the spatial aspects of the novel is excellent, while Liza Knapp also has very interesting things to say about the charac? ters' names. The jointly written sections on editions, translations, and recommended reading will provide an invaluable resource. Turning to the main body of the book, not one of the twenty-one essays proper may be considered a weak link. Some follow the rubric of the title very closely, and discuss actual classroom experiences in detail. A second group pay only perfunctory service to this criterion, while others ignore reference to teaching entirely. In the view of the present reader, this last group?whether coincidentally or not?provide the most sophisticated, interesting, and original readings. Space does not allow consi? deration of all the essays, so I shall cherry-pick those which particularly impressed. William Mills Todd opens proceedings with an account of the serialization of the novel, which is both erudite and highly practical. Harriet Murav accomplishes some? thing very similar in her discussion of law in Anna Karenina. Caryl Emerson, as one would expect, offers a subtle, sensitive, and innovative reading of an old topic in her 'Tolstoy versus Dostoevsky and Bakhtin's Ethics of the Classroom'. Donna Orwin writes illuminatingly on the paradoxes of Tolstoy's approach to philosophy, while Judith Armstrong points to another key paradox, namely that, although Anna is commonly read with and against other classics in the context of 'adultery and the novel', in Russia it is almost without precedent in dealing with this topic. Best of all, though, are two very differentessays. Gary Saul Morson offersa brilliantly simple exposition of Tolstoy's world-view through the microcosm of Levin's struggles to improve farming methods. In a typically virtuoso performance of verbal pyrotechnics, Helena Goscilo gives us a superbly polemical demolition of Tolstoy's obsessions with breastfeeding and motherhood, among other things, coming to the uncompromising conclusion: 'The problem with Anna Karenina is not the wayward heroine's doom but the novel's inflexible closedness fromthe very outset to alternative plot developments and resolutions. In questions of gender, Anna Karenina combines structural rigor with conceptual rigor mortis' (p. 89). The editors and publishers are to be applauded for bringing together such a rich variety of excellent contributions. Keele University Joe Andrew Selected Essays. By Viacheslav Ivanov. Ed. by Michael Wachtel, trans. by Robert Bird. (Studies in Russian Literature and Theory) Evanston, IL: Northwest? ern University Press. 2003. xx +328 pp. $99.95; ?68.50 (pbk $24.95; ?17.50). ISBNo-8ioi-i522-o(pbko-8ioi-2o83-6). In the past five years or so there has been a steady progression of publications on the Russian poet, critic, and philosopher Viacheslav Ivanov, including monographs, previously unpublished works, and conference proceedings. Among them, Western contributions have been rather fewer in number than previously, so the appearance of this collection of translations of Ivanov's essays is a particularly welcome attempt to introduce him to a wider, English-speaking audience, given the breadth and depth of his engagement with classical and Western European literatures, thought, religion, and art as well as his pre-eminent place in contemporary debates on the history and development of Russian culture. 306 Reviews However, the extent of Ivanov's erudition was such that the editor of a volume such as this is faced with the problem of either choosing essays dealing with subjects familiar to the Western reader, thus distorting the range of Ivanov's interests at the expense of making them more immediately approachable, or making a selection more representative of his work as a whole. Wachtel has chosen the latter approach, paying particular attention to...

Monopoly Linear and Nonlinear Pricing

This pedagogical note explains how the same basic principle can be applied to explain the profit-maximizing behavior of a monopolist under both linear and nonlinear pricing by introducing an average price function. It is shown that optimal conditions under nonlinear pricing are similar to that of linear pricing. These conditions can be explained through a simple graphical exposition. The optimal conditions under monopolistic linear and nonlinear price discriminations are also similar.

Instrumental Variables for Binary Treatments with Heterogenous Treatment Effects: A Simple Exposition

This note provides a simple exposition of what IV can and cannot estimate in a model with binary treatment variable and heterogenous treatment effects. It shows how linear IV is essentially a misspecification of functional form and the reason why linear IV estimates will generally depend on the instrument used is because of this misspecification. It shows that if one can estimate the correct functional form then the treatment effects are independent of the instruments used. However, the data may not be rich enough in practice to be able to identify these treatments effects without strong distributional assumptions. In this case, one will have to settle for estimations of treatment effects that are instrument-dependent.

Should Consumers Be Priced Out of Pollution-Permit Markets?

The authors present a simple diagrammatic exposition of a pollution-permit market in which both firms that generate pollution and consumers who are harmed by pollution are allowed to purchase permits at a single market price. They show that the market equilibrium is efficient if and only if the endowment of permits is equal to the efficient level of pollution. Furthermore, if consumers actually participate in the market, then the equilibrium is not efficient. Welfare can be improved by decreasing the endowment of permits and thereby pricing consumers out of the market.

Weighted Average Cost of Capital (WACC) with Risky Debt: A Simple Exposition (I)

Debt is rarely risk-free. Yet, on grounds of simplicity, in most discussions on the weighted average cost of capital (WACC), we assume that the debt is risk-free. At the same, in the calculation of the WACC, we may use a value for the cost of debt d that is higher than the risk-free rate rf. In this teaching note, using simple binomial models, we examine the weighted average cost of capital (WACC) with risky debt and no taxes. Taxes raise additional complications. In a subsequent note, we analyze the case with taxes. With risky debt, we have to use the expected rate of return on the debt rather than the promised rate of return on the debt in the formula for the WACC. Furthermore, we model the expected cost of risky debt as an increasing function of the amount of debt.

Framework for Economic Appraisal: a Simple Exposition of Harberger's Approach

In this teaching note, we present a clear and detailed exposition of Harberger's approach to economic appraisal. The Harberger framework consists of three basic postulates. The first postulate states that the demand curve measures the benefits of a project. The second postulate states that the supply curve measures the costs of a project. The third postulate (summing up) states that we simply use the values from the demand and supply curves without any weighting. We assume that there are no market distortions such as taxes and subsidies. In a subsequent teaching note, we will introduce the impact of market distortions, such as taxes and subsidies, on the estimation of economic prices.

The Role of Openness in the Debate on Rules vs. Discretion: A Simple Exposition

In this paper, we examine to what extent the degree of openness matters for the conduct of monetary policy. Our findings suggest that the stabilising properties of nominal income and price level targeting often reported in the literature on monetary policy in closed economies do not carry over to an economy that imports an intermediate input. We also show that the inverse link between openness and average inflation reported by Romer (1993) obtains under discretion. Finally, we compare and contrast discretion to the various rule‐based strategies of monetary policy using policy frontiers. In all but one comparison greater openness makes discretion more attractive relative to the rule‐based strategies of monetary policy. Nevertheless, in light of empirical estimates for the size of the variances of demand and supply shocks, the case for rule‐based monetary policy strategies cannot be dismissed. Rule‐based strategies perform better against discretion in the face of supply disturbances rather than demand disturbances.

Donald Schon's Philosophy of Design and Design Education

Donald A. Schon is among our generation’s most influential philosophers of design and design education, yet remains uncelebrated in both philosophy and design education. This paradox dissolves when we consider Schon’s specific contribution. He was, by his own account, a displaced philosopher working in (among other places) a management consulting firm, a governmental agency, a non-profit center for social development, and finally a university department of urban planning. He used his marginal position in the design professions to reframe professional practice generally. Schon spoke from philosophy and design to professional practice, conceiving design to be its unifying core. From his philosophy of design he projected a new model for teaching and learning in the professions, and a new conception of the research university. The former has been taken up and elaborated by educators in the professions ‐ in schools of medicine, law, business, public administration, education, engineering, architecture, among others. The latter has entered the mainstream of discussion among higher education reformers. Philosophers and design educators have not paid the same measure of attention to Schon’s ideas. My purpose in this article is to re-introduce Schon as philosopher and design educator, to provide a simple exposition of his basic ideas ‐ his conception of design, his notion that all professional practice is ‘designlike,’ his ideas about how design is taught and learned, and his conception of the university as a collection of schools of design.

Willingness to pay and willingness to accept: a simple conceptual exposition

A simple explanation within the theory of indifference curves is offered for the experimental observations concerning the disparity between willingness to pay (WTP) and willingness to accept (WTA). Following Morrison's evidence, this explanation rests largely on the endowment effect. Two demand curves which are distinguished in terms of WTP and WTA are derived.

Heresy in the University: The Black Athena Controversy and the Responsibilities of American Intellectuals

One of the most controversial books to come out of the academy in the last fifteen years is Martin Bernal's Black Athena. It has been a true cause celebre. Afrocentrists have both praised the book and claimed that Bernal stole from the work of black scholars to create his study of the Afroasiastic roots of classical civilization. Classicists feel passionately about what they perceive as an attack from an outsider on the origins not only of ancient Greece but of their own discipline. It seems that everyone has something to say about the book; the question is how many really understand it. In Heresy in the University, Jacques Berlinerblau provides an exegesis of the contents of Black Athena, making it accessible to a wider audience. As he clarifies and restates Bernal's opus, Berlinerblau identifies Bernal's flaws in reasoning and gaps in evidence. He cuts to the heart of Bernal's prose, singling out the key points of Bernal's argument, explaining and arranging them in a cogent manner. Berlinerblau addresses the critics' really important objections, including his own, and links each of them to the appropriate substantive argument in Black Athena. He goes beyond simple summary and exposition to present the underlying --stated and unstated--agendas of Bernal and his critics. Ultimately, he exposes both sides and asks what the flawed reasoning from all concerned reveals about the stakes in this key academic dispute and what that, in turn, says about the modern academy. Jacques Berlinerblau is an assistant professor and director of Judaic studies at Hofstra University.

A Simple Exposition of the Social Security Trust Fund

Beginning with the 1998 State of the Union address, the Clinton administration has focused on fixing Social Security. President Clinton announced that projected federal surpluses should be reserved until a Social Security overhaul has been passed. Instead of using the surplus to cut taxes or increase spending, he stressed the idea, Save Social Security first. In the meantime, experts from House Speaker Newt Gingrich (Duff 1998) to economist Robert Eisner (1998) have announced plans to fix Social Security. What is the typical student of economics to make of all this?

A Simple Exposition of the Social Security Trust Fund

A Simple Exposition of the Social Security Trust Fund

An effective allocation criterion for CO 2 emissions

The Kyoto Protocol has set relatively easy targets for emission limitations for Annex I parties. These are not sufficient to save the earth from climate change or to “prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference” of the climate. It is the contention of the authors that eventually all parties to the Protocol will have to undertake commitments. Equal per capita emissions, with simple and transparent adjustments for the short- and medium-term, could be the most equitable basis for allocating emissions rights. It is reasonable to accept an individual — as the unit of account since we are discussing anthropogenic emissions, i.e. those which are generated by humans. Besides being equitable, for any criterion to be successful it should be effective and implementable. In order to be effective, global emissions have to be restricted to a pre-determined level. This is possible with the widest participation, which would include both Annex I and Non-annex I countries. The approach should be practical, flexible and one which is easy to implement.This paper proposes a very simple exposition of the “common but differentiated” responsibility concept (Article 4.1 of the FCCC). It aims to strike a balance between the concerns relating to the choice of the numeraire, viz., population and GDP in determining emission targets. In other words both equity and efficiency considerations are addressed in the approach suggested herein. The authors would like to acknowledge Dr Leo Schrattenholzer for providing invaluable comments and Dr Tom Wigley for providing critical information.

A model of social capital and access to productive resources

The paper addresses the conceptual problem of defining social capital in economic development and presents a theoretical model that concentrates on describing the role of reputation mechanisms in accessing productive resources. The present work is part of a broader research programme aimed at developing a framework for fruitfully integrating social capital research issues within development economics. What follows is a simple exposition of some basic results from one version of the model, whilst its placement vis-à-vis the existing economic, political and sociological literature is discussed elsewhere. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Self-Reflections on Beyond the Great Story: The Ambivalent Author as Ironic Interlocutor

Self-Reflections on Beyond the Great Story: The Ambivalent Author as Ironic Interlocutor Robert F. Berkhofer Jr. (bio) It is truly flattering to have such thoughtful scholars read so carefully one’s book. Their diverse comments prove once again the basic truth of reader-response or reception theory: the same text is read in varying ways by different scholars. As a corollary of this principle: no text can be all things to all persons and all interpretive communities (in spite of an author’s hopes). The three commentaries individually and collectively raise, and at times exemplify, significant issues and problems common to discussions of modernism and postmodernism in relation to historical practice. My book argues that these complicated issues and their implicated problems in this debate are as important to working, that is practicing, teachers, writers, filmmakers, archivists, and museum exhibitors as they are to those with a general theoretical interest in how to represent the past as (a) history. I propose in this forum to discuss how this mixture of theory and problems of practice apply to Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse as authorial artifact. What is the irony of postmodernist theorizing that inspires Beyond The Great Story? The chief dilemma of postmodernist theorizing for the historian in my opinion is how to do history when all is “nothing but history.” 1 At the heart of postmodernism according to some scholars is the radical historicization of all intellectual categories and disciplinary practices, including those of historical representation itself. Since, as F. R. [End Page 365] Ankersmit argues, postmodernism is not “content to stop halfway” in its historicism, postmodernist theorizing deconstructs all current efforts to construe and represent the past as history at the same time as it privileges, even demands, a thorough-going historicization in and of all disciplines. 2 To assert under these circumstances that all should be historicized does not solve the problem of how to represent the past in a classroom, book, museum exhibit, or film. Does Beyond the Great Story advocate a postmodern approach to historical textualization? Reviewers have differed on whether I have “converted” in my old age to postmodernism or still harbor the high and late modernist orientations exhibited respectively in A Behavioral Approach to Historical Analysis (1969) and The White Man’s Indian (1978). No matter how convoluted the evolution of my book’s text, I always intended the volume as a guide to the controversies over old and new claims of how best to pursue Clio’s promise to record and exhort. Although the book turned out far longer than I ever intended, the general purpose and thrust remain the same: a handbook examining the controversies over modernist and postmodernist approaches to practicing and representing history today. That the issues are complex and the problems resistant to easy solution complicate any simple exposition, especially according to traditional standards of English style which embody an Anglophone common-sense philosophy of language opposed to the basic premises of a self-conscious postmodernism. I did not intend to maintain a unified, consistent position in the book. First, I tried to represent the mutually incompatible positions modernists and postmodernists take on such basic issues as text and context, politics and paradigms, constructionism and historical representation, and authority and objectivity. Second, I am ambivalent on some of the issues myself. Perhaps because I have lived through and tried to understand too many academic fashions, I am sympathetic to aspects of both late and postmodernist positions. Both the inclusion of positions with which I disagree and my ambivalence on some of the most important issues probably accounts for my authorial/rhetorical stance as the ironic interlocutor in the book. I firmly believe, however, that both late modernist self-conscious constructionism and postmodernist reflexive deconstructionism demand new forms of historical representation different from those customary in the discipline. 3 [End Page 366] Is Beyond the Great Story itself a postmodernist history? This is a matter of genre if that word refers to the conventions one or more interpretive communities use to decode an artifact in order to read it as a text and establish its meaning. This is a matter of the relationship between...

Predictors of Environmental Critical Thinking: A Study of Mexican Children

Abstract Sixty Mexican elementary school students completed questionnaires that were designed to assess the students' ability to distinguish environmental facts from opinions. Three demographic variables (gender, age, grade level), two psychological factors (academic skills, pro-environmental competencies), and four teaching strategies (exposition, examples, feedback, and positive reinforcement) were tested as possible predictors of environmental critical thinking. Results of a multiple regression revealed that the use of teaching strategies, the possession of pro-environmental competencies, and the exhibition of academic skills were significant determinants of the ability under study. Giving examples, providing feedback, and reinforcing a proper distinction between environmental facts and opinions produced higher scores on critical thinking, compared with the effects of using a simple exposition of this difference. These results are discussed in terms of the importance of developing critical thinking ski...

The Age of German Idealism (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 525 and third Paralogisms, and the second edition subjective deduction, always with an eye towards what implications the arguments have for Kant's model of the mind. Discussion of his detailed exegetical work is not possible here, but his major claims should at least be mentioned. First, Brook stresses against Henrich, Strawson, and Guyer that ASA is not crucial to the actual argument of either Transcendental Deduction (TD). Second, Brook argues that the relational categories play a crucial role in the TD, since they alone enable the unification of global objects. Third, Brook notes that Kant's Paralogisms fit nicely with contemporary functionalism's agnosticism about the ultimate structure of the mind. Fourth, Brook interprets the Paralogisms as employing two strategies: a) an analysis of the concepts of a thinking being and of self-awareness and b) an examination of what self-awareness tells us about ourselves. Finally, Brook interprets Kant's model of the mind as implying that we can be aware of the mind as it is and, further, that the mind is a global representation. Brook's twofold project is quite interesting and very worthwhile reading for both contemporary philosophers of mind and Kant scholars. Philosophers of mind will appreciate Brook's attempts to make Kant both accessible and relevant to their own concerns in philosophically interesting ways, while Kant scholars can benefit from his clear and detailed exegetical work. It should be noted, however, that Brook neglects almost entirely the relevant German scholarship on Kant's theory of mind in the form of work by G. Prauss, W. Carl, M. Frank, G. Mohr, B. Th61e, and D. Sturma (to mention but a few), and Brook's arguments are at times not as explicit as one might like. Also, Brook's final claims that we can be aware of the mind as it is and that the mind is a global representation raise serious questions, especially since the latter seems to conflict directly with Kant's belief (based on practical arguments) that the noumenal self is an immaterial substance, not a representation. ERIC WATKINS Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins, editors. The Age of German Idealism. Routledge History of Philosophy, Volume VI. New York: Routledge, 1993. Pp. xxv + 4o8. Cloth, $85.oo. This is a collaborative work. The eleven chapters have eleven different authors (including the two editors). The editors have added a short introduction, a valuable chronology showing events in politics, the arts, science, and philosophy from the birth of Rousseau (l 712) to the death of Schopenhauer (186o), and a glossary. The authors have tried to write an introductory account of their assigned topic; and the essays are quite self-contained. So the volume fails to be a historyof philosophy at all, because interactions and influences are only sporadically discussed. It will be most useful to students making their first acquaintance with the particular authors (and works) dealt with. I shall offer here only a summary verdict upon it, chapter by chapter; and the reader must remember that myjudgment is probably sounder for the first eight chapters than for the last three. 526 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 33:3 JULY 1995 L. W. Beck's "From Leibniz to Kant" is elementary "history of philosophy" at its best. He expounds the German Enlightenment from its two sides (Rationalism and Pietism), looking always for the problems that it bequeathed to Kant. A better historical introduction to the study of Kant could hardly be imagined. Virtually all of us (students and teachers alike) need it; one hopes that all will read it (and fears that many will not). Kant has three chapters, and their value is rather uneven. Daniel Bonevac is content to provide a brief and simple exposition of the deductions of the categories in the Critique of Pure Reason--with a few pages on the Dialectic, especially the treatment of the Ontological Proof. Then Don Becker deals with Kant's moral philosophy almost entirely through the Grundlegung; after that he passes to the Metaphysik der Sitten, the essay on history, and "Perpetual Peace." The Critique of Practical Reason itself--which beginning students of the Categorical...

An expository model of credit rationing

This paper presents a simple exposition of the main results behind more complicated credit rationing models. It uses a standard, static model of the banking firm to analyze the effects of changing the interest rate on loans and the probability of repayment. Using simple elasticity arguments we demonstrate how “natural” credit rationing can arise.

Three departures from maximizing behavior and their Keynesian features: a simple exposition

This exposition addresses three reasonable departures from fully maximizing behavior that exhibit important Keynesian features. These departures involve inertial, imitative, and error-conscious behaviors. A simple general frame-work is used to model the three departures in an otherwise fully optimizing model. This makes transparent the differences in the underlying mechanisms and the sources of the Keynesian results.

On global diffeomorphisms of euclidian space

As IS WELL KNOWN, the first attempt at characterizing global diffeomorphisms of IR” goes back to the 1906 work of Hadamard [l]. Since that time, progress in the global diffeomorphism problem has been rather slow. Notable contributions are those of Levy [2] who generalized Hadamard’s theorem to Banach spaces and of Banach and Mazur [3] and Caccioppoli [4] who proved the so-called “properness criterion” saying that a proper local homeomorphism of a Banach space is a global homeomorphism. The standard proofs of the theorems of Hadamard and Levy and of Banach, Mazur and Caccioppoli rely upon ideas of what is now called covering space theory, via the important “homotopy lifting property” of coverings (see e.g. [5]). This approach makes it clear that it is only lack of compactness of IR” that allows for the existence of noninjective local homeomorphisms when n L 2, the complex exponential when n = 2 being the most famous example, The theorems mentioned above were found again by various authors, sometimes in special cases and sometimes in a different framework but always through some variant of the same argument. A synthesis was made by Rheinboldt [6] in 1969. Part of his results were rediscovered five years later by Plastock [7] and given a somewhat simpler exposition for the special case of Banach spaces. Other contributions were made by Meisters and Olech [8] (global homeomorphisms of bounded domains in I?“), Meyer [9] (complementing the work of Levy) and Radulescu and Radulescu [lo] (expanding upon Plastock’s results). Many other articles have been devoted to special cases, where extra hypotheses are introduced consistently with the problem at hand. For instance, polynomial mappings only are relevant to the Jacobian conjecture of algebraic geometry, and hypotheses about the spectrum of the derivative at each point come up in a natural way in global stability questions for differential equations. The new results presented in this paper have been obtained through arguments from critical point theory and differential topology. Here, the central notion is that of admissible flow. Given a mapping F: Ii?” + IR”, the main property of what we call an F-admissible flow q: IR x (Ii?” F-‘(O)) + I?” F-‘(O) is that, for every x E IR” F-‘(O), the function t jF(q(t, x))l (where 1.1 is the Euclidean norm) is strictly increasing and tends to 0 (resp. 00) as t tends to --co (resp. 00). The basic feature we prove is that a local diffeomorphism F is a global one if and only if F-'(O) # (ZI and there is an F-admissible flow. This statement makes it clear that 0 plays a special role regarding F-admissibility, and the condition F-'(O) # 0 cannot be eliminated (as examples will show). The introduction of F-admissibility followed the author’s remark that, in Hilbert space, Hadamard’s theorem could be derived from the mountain pass theorem of Ambrosetti and