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This paper places Kydland and Prescott's classic analysis of time inconsistency in a fuller context by examining their result in five different economic environments. Pedagogically, the paper uses a consistent mathematical treatment of the subject throughout. To understand the motivations of the central bank, the paper begins with the environment that Kydland-Prescott successfully criticized wherein the public has static inflationary expectations and the central bank assumes that they do. The main sections of the paper go on to analyze time inconsistency in four alternative environments defined by the belief structure of the central bank with respect to the nature of the economy and the mechanism by which the public forms its inflationary expectations. It is shown that the inconsistency result holds when the central bank does not understand the natural rate hypothesis and does not believe that the public forms their inflationary expectations rationally. The inconsistency result, however, does not hold in the other cases.

AbstractThe gradual implementation of new pedagogical methods in Ottoman schools during the second half of the nineteenth century brought about significant changes in the organization of teaching time. The first part of this paper focuses on some of these changes and demonstrates that the adoption of time-tabled instruction facilitated increased levels of surveillance and centralization, and a more efficient pedagogical process. The same temporal constructs also served as an implicit curriculum, imbuing students with a keen time consciousness. The effect of the structure, I maintain in the second part of the article, was reinforced by time-related educational contents. Late Ottoman textbooks attached moral value to regularity, punctuality and efficiency and weaved such traits, now praised as virtues, into the ideological agendas of both the Hamidian and the Young Turk regimes. Thus, through the mutual reinforcing effect of form and content, the Ottoman education system contributed to the formation of new elites that identified temporal order with ideas of progress and patriotism, as well as authoritarianism. Similar time-related material was taught to female students in an attempt to mobilize them for the Ottoman project of modernization, while constantly reminding them of the limited roles they could actually play in that project.

My intention was, not to survey political novels, or the ones I like best, or novels that meet some ahistorical standard of excellence, but to consider those that are in one way or another central to American bourgeois culture, and to help students understand that culture through their reading of the novels. . . . I adopted an approach that might be unsympa­thetically described as building the novels up in order to knock them down. But I think the strategy is warranted. Looking closely at what's good in one of these novels almost invariably means following some insight into the difficulty of living a good life on the terms offered by our society. (Many of the novelists would probably let it go at "living a good life," but since they take America as a given, the mimesis of capitalism is always there.) This is, to put it crudely, the problem posed by each novel, often revealingly. Most go on to hint at solutions, and here's where I think they fall apart. They displace politics and offer personal or anarchist or pre-industrial remedies for human sorrows that are rooted in advanced capitalist, industrial society.