Journal Article Recent Books on Mathematical and Statistical Method Get access W. L. Crum W. L. Crum Harvard University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 39, Issue 2, February 1925, Pages 313–319, https://doi.org/10.2307/1884877 Published: 01 February 1925

New sources of reliable data, 414. — I. The facts: primary and secondary data, 415. — Examples in industry, the laws of the optimum and of the two returns, 416. — Similarly in agriculture, 421. — The costs of production decrease with the increase in capital, examples in industry, 425. — Similarly in agriculture, 429. — Vertical integration reduces cost, 430. — Two opposing factors bring about the emergence of the three laws, 431. — II. The theory: New formulation of the two laws of return, 437. — The law of equilibrium, 442. — The emergence of the optimum size, 446. — Differences in capitals the cause of the emergence of profit, 447. — The older theories invalid, 447. — The Marxian theory is based on wrong secondary data, which assume but do not prove the conclusions, 448. — Theory of interest, 449. — Influence of both kinds of size, 451. — Influence of time, 452. — Singular position of commercial loans, 452.

I. All products inaccurate; need of tolerance, 687. — Tactile pressure, and its delicacy in arts and crafts, 688. — II. Physiological causes of differences between individuals in accuracy of work, 690. — Memory and attention, 691. — No measure of accuracy or of labor, 693. — III. Differences in wages based on differing accuracy, 695. — Division of labor on that basis, 696.

Abstract This article provides evidence from a fragile state that citizens demand more of a voice in the government when it tries to tax them. I examine a field experiment randomizing property tax collection across 356 neighborhoods of a large Congolese city. The tax campaign was the first time most citizens had been registered by the state or asked to pay formal taxes. It raised property tax compliance from 0.1% in control to 11.6% in treatment. It also increased political participation by about 5 percentage points (31%): citizens in taxed neighborhoods were more likely to attend town hall meetings hosted by the government or submit evaluations of its performance. To participate in these ways, the average citizen incurred costs equal to their daily household income, and treated citizens spent 43% more than control. Treated citizens also positively updated about the provincial government, perceiving more revenue, less leakage, and a greater responsibility to provide public goods. The results suggest that broadening the tax base has a “participation dividend,” a key idea in historical accounts of the emergence of inclusive governance in early modern Europe and a common justification for donor support of tax programs in weak states.

What determines the intensity and objects of hatred?Hatred forms when people believe that outgroups are responsible for past and future crimes, but the reality of past crimes has little to do with the level of hatred.Instead, hatred is the result of an equilibrium where politicians supply stories of past atrocities in order to discredit the opposition and consumers listen to them.The supply of hatred is a function of the degree to which minorities gain or lose from particular party platforms, and as such, groups that are particularly poor or rich are likely to be hated.Strong constitutions that limit the policy space and ban specific anti-minority policies will limit hate.The demand for hatred falls if consumers interact regularly with the hated group, unless their interactions are primarily abusive.The power of hatred is so strong that opponents of hatred motivate their supporters by hating the haters.

This paper develops a model of the interaction between the supply of hate-creating stories from politicians and the willingness of voters to listen to hatred. Hatred is fostered with stories of an out-group's crimes, but the impact of these stories comes from repetition not truth. Hate-creating stories are supplied by politicians when such actions help to discredit opponents whose policies benefit an out-group. Egalitarians foment hatred against rich minorities; opponents of re-distribution build hatred against poor minorities. Hatred relies on people accepting, rather than investigating, hate-creating stories. Hatred declines when there is private incentive to learn the truth. Increased economic interactions with a minority group may provide that incentive. This framework is used to illuminate the evolution of anti-Black hatred in the United States South, episodes of anti-Semitism in Europe, and the recent surge of anti-Americanism in the Arab world.

This paper provides a quantitative theory for the recent rise in residual wage inequality consistent with the empirical observation that a sizable part of this increase has a transitory nature, a feature that eludes standard models based on ex ante heterogeneity in ability. An acceleration in the rate of quality improvement of equipment, like the one observed from the early 1970s, increases the productivity/quality differentials across machines (jobs). In a frictional labor market, this force translates into higher wage dispersion even among ex ante equal workers. With vintage-human capital, the acceleration reduces workers' capacity to transfer skills from old to new machines, generating a rise in the cross-sectional variance of skills, and therefore of wages. Through calibration, the paper shows that this mechanism can account for 30 percent of the surge in residual inequality in the U. S. economy (or for most of its transitory component). Two key implications of the theory—faster within-job wage growth and larger wage losses upon displacement—find empirical support in the data.

There is a long-standing trade-off in bioculture between concentrating on high-yield varieties and maintaining sufficient diversity to lower the risks of catastrophic infection. The paper uses a simple ecology-based model of endogenous disease to indicate how a local decision to plant more of a widely grown crop creates negative externalities by increasing the probability that new pathogens will evolve to attack the crop globally. Society's basic issue concerns where to locate on an efficiency frontier between economic profitability and a standard formula for ecological entropy-proved here to be a rigorous measure of “generalized resistance” to crop-ecosystem failure.

This paper evaluates the loss of global welfare from exhaustion of nonrenewable resources, such as oil. The underlying methodology represents an empirical application of some recent developments in the theory of green accounting and sustainability. The paper estimates that the world loses the equivalent of about 1 percent of final consumption per year from finiteness of the earth's resources, compared with a counterfactual trajectory where global extraction of minerals is allowed to remain forever constant at today's flow rates and extraction costs.

High consumer indebtedness threatens future consumption spending if default is expensive. Consumer spending collapsed in 1930, turning a minor recession into the Great Depression. Households were shouldering an unprecedented burden of installment debt. Down payments were large. Contracts were short. Equity in durable goods was therefore acquired quickly. Missed installment pa5niients triggered repossession, reducing consumer wealth in 1930 because households lost all acquired equity. Cutting consumption was the only viable strategy in 1930 for avoiding default. Institutional changes lowered the cost of default by 1938. When recession began again, indebted households chose to default rather than reduce consumption.