Suchergebnisse

Major factors in biological and social systems -- Resource and technology -- Production : a mathematical theory -- Languages and cultures : an economic analysis -- The entropy theory of mind -- The entropy theory of value : a mathematical theory -- Epilogue : pioneer species and climax species.

This book examines the positive effects of the petition system on China's resilient decentralized authoritarian regime. Combining detailed case studies and rigorous statistical analysis, it argues that citizens' petitions help the regime to alleviate threats to stability by giving an information edge to the Chinese central government.

This book presents a new economic theory developed from physical and biological principles. It explains how technology, social systems and economic values are intimately related to resources. Many people have recognized that mainstream (neoclassical) economic theories are not consistent with physical laws and often not consistent with empirical patterns, but most feel that economic activities are too complex to be described by a simple and coherent mathematical theory. While social systems are indeed complex, all life systems, including social systems, satisfy two principles. First, all systems need to extract resources from the external environment to compensate for their consumption. Second, for a system to be viable, the amount of resource extraction has to be no less than the level of consumption. From these two principles, we derive a quantitative theory of major factors in economic activities, such as fixed cost, variable cost, discount rate, uncertainty and duration. The mathematical theory enables us to systematically measure the effectiveness of different policies and institutional structures at varying levels of resource abundance and cost. The theory presented in this book shows that there do not exist universally optimal policies or institutional structures. Instead, the impacts of different policies or social structures have to be measured within the context of existing levels of resource abundance. As the physical costs of extracting resources rise steadily, many policy assumptions adopted in mainstream economic theories, and workable in times of cheap and abundant energy supplies and other resources, need to be reconsidered. In this rapidly changing world, the theory presented here provides a solid foundation for examining the long-term impacts of today's policy decisions. Physics.

Abstract: This article argues that positive US-China relations enabled China in 2004 to diversify its strategy toward Haiti, a staunch supporter of Taiwan, by contributing its first-ever Formed Police Unit (FPU) to the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH). The organizational readiness of the China Peacekeeping Police Training Center (CPPTC) also played a large role in shaping this development. With the contribution of its FPUs, China intended to influence Haiti and reset bilateral relations. However, the limited training capacity of CPPTC meant that China could only contribute one FPU at a time—even though contributing more FPUs would have strengthened its influence on Haiti even more. When US-China relations turned negative and Zhou Yongkang, the chief patron of the Chinese police, lost power in 2012, China terminated its participation.

AbstractThis paper compares the empirical relationship between industrial diversity and economic stability across different geographical scales, including counties, states, Economic Areas, and Metropolitan Statistical Areas, in the contiguous U.S. between 2000 and 2014. It is found that this relationship varies greatly when it is analyzed across these four geographical scales. Meanwhile, several scale‐related problems, such as the modifiable areal unit problem and the small population problem, are introduced to economic diversity literature and further discussed with this variability of the diversity–stability relationship. This paper concludes that the spatial scale problem as well as the optimal unit can be study dependent. Thus, when choosing analytical units to quantify regional economic structure for a specific study, future research should pay attention to scale‐related problems.

Abstract
This article examines how the making of pre-Tang poetry anthologies in sixteenth-century Ming China led to a reinvention of the pre-Tang poetic tradition. From the Zhengde period 正德 (1506–21) well into the Wanli reign 萬曆 (1573–1620), the compilation and publication of new pre-Tang poetry anthologies saw a dramatic increase, making the anthologizing practices in the 1500s crucial to understanding the pre-Tang tradition. Through a study of paratextual elements (book titles, tables of contents, prefaces, postscripts, etc.) in twenty-two pre-Tang poetry anthologies compiled in the 1500s, this article identifies three types of anthologizing practices. By employing quantitative and network analysis, the author hopes to historicize these practices, investigate the motivations for the anthologies, and explore their citation networks. These anthologizing practices, I conclude, gradually transformed the classification principles of previous anthologies, expanded the scope of canonized anthologies, and established a distinct pre-Tang tradition by the end of the sixteenth century.