We study the co-evolution of social participation and social capital accumulation, taking the view that the former contributes to the latter, and both contribute to socially enjoyed leisure. We show that a process of substitution of private for social activities (observable in some advanced, affluent economies), might be self-reinforcing and lead to a Pareto-dominated steady state. We find some...

L atin America has been the cutting edge of struggles worldwide against neoliberalism. Several alternatives to the dominant model of global capitalism appear to be emerging in the region. A new model of revolutionary struggle and popular transformation from below for the 21 st century may be emerging, based on the Venezuelan experience, but more broadly, on mass popular struggles in Ecuador, Bo...

In the recent literature on the dynamics of the distribution of wealth in the U.S. two empirical results have received considerable attention. First, that wealth is distributed according to a power law distribution at high wealth levels. Second, that wealth inequality has intensified over the past two decades (Weicher, 1997; Wolff, 1998; Rodriguez et al., 2002). Notwithstanding the focus on the...

Social network services like Twitter and Facebook have created an expectation that you interact with your customers, followers and friends. There’s an expectation to connect rather than broadcast, listen and engage in conversations. But how can we expect to interact with our invisible audience when we can’t really see whose there? For the first time in history, there is a plethora of informatio...

Current traditional technologies, while enabling effective knowledge sharing and accumulation, seem to be less supportive of knowledge organization, use and consensus formation, as well as of collaborative decision making process. To address these limitations and thus to better foster collective decisionmaking around complex and controversial problems, a new family of tools is emerging able to ...

In many instances one may want to gain situational awareness in an environment by monitoring the content of local social media users. Often the challenge is how to build a set of users from a target location. Here we introduce a method for building such a set of users by using an expand-classify approach which begins with a small set of seed users from the target location and then iteratively c...

In order to explain excess co-operation in the one-shot prisoner's dilemma game, we first question the standard assumption of stable and selfish preferences by introducing the concept of social capital. This analysis leads to a model that explains excess co-operation through an accumulation of social capital. We allow preferences and norms to change over time and hence endogenise them. Our resu...

The paper examines the problem of aggregating infinite utility streams with a social welfare function which respects the Anonymity and Weak Pareto Axioms. It provides a complete characterization of domains (of the one period utilities) on which such an aggregation is possible. A social welfare function satisfying the Anonymity and Weak Pareto Axioms exists on precisely those domains which do no...

Fostering Within-Family Human Capital Investment: An Intragenerational Insurance Perspective of Social Security We develop a general equilibrium stochastic OLG model with heterogenous households. Households differ with respect to their productivity. Productivity depends stochastically on parents' unobservable investment in their child's human capital and an aggregate productivity shock. We intr...

September 2002 Abstract This paper, in a quantitative way, studies the macroeconomic and welfare effects of introducing a progressive expenditure tax in a situation with the aging of the Japanese population. The paper simulates capital accumulation and social welfare by taking account of the general equilibrium effects of intragenerational inequality in order to predict the future aged society....