If an economic system has a regime switch, then we could assume that the preferences have remained basically the same, but that only the state of information has changed. An alternative view is that there has been a shift of preferences, as for example individual persons can change their mind...

W3C is about to release MathML 2.0. This should have been a joyous occasion, but it appears to be a horror. They created a horrible way to do mathematics on the internet. It is Byzantinely complex, unintuitive, unesthetic, highly undocumented, it requires complex software support, etcetera. A...

Some economists think that there is no free lunch. Fore this reason they close their eyes to the free lunch that presently exists in the inefficient labour market. It can be shown that the economy is full of free lunches. The major example is economic growth by innovation. When the possibility...

Jan Tinbergen helped creating the Dutch Central Planning Bureau after 1945, and Dutch society has benefitted enormously up to this very day in 2004. The Dutch situation has also been an example to the world. But there is a down side when the CPB adopts a wrong theory and when policy becomes...

World developments in the 1990s show a worrysome parallel to the 1930s with the Great Depression. Present- day Russia reminds of the pre-war Weimar republic, where a devastated economy and weak democracy allowed Hitler to take power. Western nations in the 1990s hinder trade with Russia and the...

Krugman, Phelps, ormerod and Heilbroner have produced forceful analyses on the current state of the economy, society and economic theory itself, and allwith a distinct attention for unemployment. These authors agree on many points, but disagree on major points too. Interestingly where these...

The economic record of this century may be judged with mixed feelings. Much has been achieved, but much has gone wrong too. The bad part in the record has not not been caused by economic science but by economic policy making. The structure of economic policy making gives too much room for...

Metaprognostica arises when one studies forecasting behaviour. Deceitful forecasts can mean profits, and hence deception is a real problem for market forecasts. For governments, Public Choice studies the behaviour of governmental institutions and officials while assuming the hypothesis of...

www.can.nl\~cool Comments: 39 pages in Word - zipped JEL: N0, Z0 EWP References: ewp-get/9604002 ewp-get/9604003 Report-no: Thomas Cool 96-05

This paper explores the links between matching, ranking, rating, Elo- rating, logit modeling, Rasch modeling, Item-Response Theory (IRT), voting, aggregation, and the like. These issues arise e.g. when testing students, or rating web pages or scientific papers. The analysis is at a very basic...