Featured | Democratic Firms
Interview at Norwegian Thinktank Manifest (English trans.)
English translation of June 2018 interview at Oslo think-tank Manifest.
Worker Cooperative as an Employee Ownership Fund
This paper shows how a worker cooperative can serve as an ESOP-like employee-ownership vehicle to make a partial or total buyout of a conventional company.
Featured | Development
Panopticon vs. McGregor’s Theory Y
This paper is part of a larger project to better understand the limitations of the economic theory of agency and incentives. The economic approach focuses on extrinsic incentives whereas a better understanding of human organization requires an understanding of intrinsic motivation and the complementary or substitutive relationships with extrinsic motivation.
Knowledge and Institutional Change
This paper attempts set forth systematically some of the knowledge questions that determine certain strategies for institutional change.
Featured | Property Theory
Lord Eustace Percy’s “Unknown State” Lecture
Lord Eustace Percy was a Conservative public servant but was better known as a serious thinker, indeed, as the “Minister of Thinking.” There is a remarkable and much-quoted passage in his 1944 Riddell Lecture The Unknown State.
A Theory of Inalienability: Towards a Theory of Classical Liberal Jurisprudence
This is a draft paper that presents some of the arguments I have been making for years in a framework analogous to Type I and Type II error in statistics–which seems to clarify the arguments. Historically, the sophisticated arguments for slavery and autocratic government were consent-based in terms of implicit or explicit contracts. And the legalized oppression of married women was based on the coverture marriage contract. Hence the critiques developed in the abolitionist, democratic, and feminist movements were not simply arguments for consent as opposed to coercion, but arguments against certain voluntary contracts, e.g., in the form of inalienable rights arguments.
Featured | Quantum Mechanics
New Light on the Objective Indefiniteness or Literal Interpretation of QM
This paper shows how the mathematics of QM is the math of indefiniteness and thus, literally and realistically interpreted, it describes an objectively indefinite reality at the quantum level. In particular, the mathematics of wave propagation is shown to also be the math of the evolution of indefinite states that does not change the degree of indistinctness between states. This corrects the historical wrong turn of seeing QM as “wave mechanics” rather than the mechanics of particles with indefinite/definite properties.
Talk: Hamming distance in classical and quantum logical information theory
This is a set of slides from a talk on introducing the Hamming distance into classical logical information theory and then developing the quantum logical notion of Hamming distance–which turns out to equal a standard notion of distance in quantum information theory, the Hilbert-Schmidt distance.
Featured | Mathematics
Extending All Boolean Operations to Partitions
The lattice operations of join and meet were defined for set partitions in the nineteenth century, but no new logical operations on partitions were defined and studied during the twentieth century. Yet there is a simple and natural graph-theoretic method presented here to define any n-ary Boolean operation on partitions. An equivalent closure-theoretic method is[Read More…]
Finding the Markets in the Math
This paper shows how to find competitive market prices in the pure mathematics of classical constrained optimization problems.
