Book Review:Regional Economic Planning: Techniques of Analysis. Walter Isard, John H. Cumberland

The role of the prominent Soviet economist, academician A. Anchishkin (1933—1987), whose 80th birth anniversary we celebrate this year, in the development of ideas and formation of economic forecasting in the country at the time when the directive planning acted as a leading tool of economic management is explored in the article. Besides, Anchishkin’s special role is noted in developing a comprehensive program of scientific and technical progress, an information basis for working out long-term forecasts of the country’s development, moreover, his contribution to the creation of long-term forecasting methodology and improvement of the statistical basis for economic analysis and economic planning. The authors show that social and economic forecasting in the period after 1991, which has undertaken a number of functions of economic planning, has largely relied on further development of Anchishkin’s ideas, at the same time responding to new challenges for the Russian economy development during its entry into the world economic system.

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: Economic Planning in Communist China . Ronald Hsia.

Far Eastern Survey ◽

10.1525/as.1955.24.10.01p09893 ◽

1955 ◽

Vol 24 (10) ◽

pp. 159-159

Author(s):

Theodore Hsi-En Chen

Keyword(s):

Economic Planning ◽

Communist China

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Dyadic Obligations over Complex Actions as Deontic Constraints in the Situation Calculus

Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning ◽

10.24963/kr.2020/26 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Jens Claßen ◽

James Delgrande

Keyword(s):

Artificial Intelligence ◽

Deontic Logic ◽

Action Theory ◽

Prima Facie ◽

Situation Calculus ◽

Artificial Agents ◽

Planning Techniques ◽

Course Of Action ◽

Reasoning About Action ◽

The Given

With the advent of artificial agents in everyday life, it is important that these agents are guided by social norms and moral guidelines. Notions of obligation, permission, and the like have traditionally been studied in the field of Deontic Logic, where deontic assertions generally refer to what an agent should or should not do; that is they refer to actions. In Artificial Intelligence, the Situation Calculus is (arguably) the best known and most studied formalism for reasoning about action and change. In this paper, we integrate these two areas by incorporating deontic notions into Situation Calculus theories. We do this by considering deontic assertions as constraints, expressed as a set of conditionals, which apply to complex actions expressed as GOLOG programs. These constraints induce a ranking of "ideality" over possible future situations. This ranking in turn is used to guide an agent in its planning deliberation, towards a course of action that adheres best to the deontic constraints. We present a formalization that includes a wide class of (dyadic) deontic assertions, lets us distinguish prima facie from all-things-considered obligations, and particularly addresses contrary-to-duty scenarios. We furthermore present results on compiling the deontic constraints directly into the Situation Calculus action theory, so as to obtain an agent that respects the given norms, but works solely based on the standard reasoning and planning techniques.

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