A. J. BROWN, “PHILLIPS’S CURVE,” AND ECONOMIC NETWORKS IN THE 1950S

This paper examines the role of the English economist Arthur (A. J.) Brown in the 1950s debate surrounding the wage-rate change/unemployment relationship. While the publication of William (Bill) Phillips’s 1958 paper and the subsequent moniker of the “Phillips Curve” attracted a wealth of attention, Brown’s book on the subject, The Great Inflation, and his later work on inflation have received much less. Here, the focus is on redressing this situation somewhat by looking at Brown’s work to see how much it predates Phillips’s paper, and what differences there are to it. We also consider this within the changing institutional structure of English economic networks in the 1950s that led to a relatively rapid acceptance of Phillips’s analysis and, in many cases, to a strong, ordinal interpretation of the Phillips Curve that overshadowed Brown’s work.

Journal of the History of Economic Thought Preprints - A.J. Brown, 'Phillips’ Curve', and Economic Networks in the 1950s

This paper is concerned with examining the role of the English economist Arthur (A.J.) Brown in the 1950s debate surrounding the wage-change unemployment relationship. While the publication of William (Bill) Phillips’ 1958 paper, and the subsequent moniker of the “Phillips Curve” attracted a wealth of attention, Brown’s book on the subject, The Great Inflation, and his later work on inflation, has received much less. Here the focus is on redressing somewhat this situation by looking at Brown’s work to see how much it predates Phillips’ paper, and what differences there are to it. We also considers this within the changing institutional structure of English economic networks in the 1950s that led to a relatively rapid acceptance of Phillips’ analysis, and in many cases, to a strong, ordinal interpretation of the Phillips Curve that overshadowed Brown’s work.

Dominance-Based Rough Set Approach to Granular Computing

Dominance-based Rough Set Approach (DRSA) was introduced as a generalization of the rough set approach for reasoning about preferences. While data describing preferences are ordinal by the nature of decision problems they concern, the ordering of data is also important in many other problems of data analysis. Even when the ordering seems irrelevant, the presence or the absence of a property (possibly graded or fuzzy) has an ordinal interpretation. Since any granulation of information is based on analysis of properties, DRSA can be seen as a general framework for granular computing. After recalling basic concepts of DRSA, the article presents their extensions in the fuzzy context and in the probabilistic setting. This permits to define the rough approximation of a fuzzy set, which is the core of the subject. The article continues with presentation of DRSA for case-based reasoning, where granular computing based on DRSA has been successfully applied. Moreover, some basic formal properties of the whole approach are presented in terms of several algebras modeling the logic of DRSA. Finally, it is shown how the bipolar generalized approximation space, being an abstraction of the standard way to deal with roughness within DRSA, can be induced from one of the algebras modeling the logic of DRSA, the bipolar Brower-Zadeh lattice.