Michèle Friend | Searcharxiv

arXiv2019

A Policy Compass for Ecological Economics

A policy compass indicates the direction in which an institution is going in terms of three general qualities. The three qualities are: suppression, harmony and passion. Any formal institution can develop a policy compass to examine the discrepancy between what the institution would like to do (suggested in its mandate) and the actual performance and situation it finds itself in. The latter is determined through an aggregation of statistical data and facts. These are made robust and stable using meta-requirements of convergence. Here, I present a version of the compass adapted to embed the central ideas of ecological economics: that society is dependent on the environment, and that economic activity is dependent on society; that we live in a world subject to at least the first two laws of thermodynamics; that the planet we live on is limited in space and resources; that some of our practices have harmful and irreversible consequences on the natural environment; that there are values other than value in exchange, such as intrinsic value and use value. In this paper, I explain how to construct a policy compass in general. This is followed by the adaptation for ecological economics. The policy compass is original, and so is the adaptation. The compass is inspired by the work of Anthony Friend, Rob Hoffman, Satish Kumar, Georgescu-Roegen, Stanislav Schmelev, Peter Söderbaum and Arild Vatn. In the conclusion, I discuss the accompanying conception of sustainability.

q-fin.GN↗

arXiv2018

Distances between formal theories

In the literature, there have been several methods and definitions for working out if two theories are "equivalent" (essentially the same) or not. In this article, we do something subtler. We provide means to measure distances (and explore connections) between formal theories. We introduce two main notions for such distances. The first one is that of \textit{axiomatic distance}, but we argue that it might be of limited interest. The more interesting and widely applicable notion is that of \textit{conceptual distance} which measures the minimum number of concepts that distinguish two theories. For instance, we use conceptual distance to show that relativistic and classical kinematics are distinguished by one concept only. We also develop further notions of distance, and we include a number of suggestions for applying and extending our project.

math.LO↗