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International audience; Cognition is dynamic, allowing us the flexibility to shift focus from different aspects of the environment, or between internally- and externally-oriented trains of thought. Although we understand how individuals switch attention across different tasks, the neurocognitive processes that underpin the dynamics of less constrained elements of cognition are less well understood. To explore this issue, we developed a paradigm in which participants intermittently responded to external events across two conditions that systematically vary in their need for updating working memory based on information in the external environment. This paradigm distinguishes the influences on cognition that emerge because of demands placed by the task (sustained) from changes that result from the time elapsed since the last task response (transient). We used experience sampling to identify dynamic changes in ongoing cognition in this paradigm, and related between subject variation in these measures to variations in the intrinsic organisation of large-scale brain networks. We found systems important for attention were involved in the regulation of off-task thought. Coupling between the ventral attention network and regions of primary motor cortex was stronger for individuals who were able to regulate off-task thought in line with the demands of the task. This pattern of coupling was linked to greater task-related thought when environmental demands were high and elevated off-task thought when demands were low. In contrast, the coupling of the dorsal attention network with a region of lateral visual cortex was stronger for individuals for whom off-task thoughts transiently increased with the time since responding to the external world increased. This pattern is consistent with a role for this system in the time-limited top-down biasing of visual processing to increase behavioural efficiency. Unlike the attention networks, coupling between regions of the default mode network and dorsal occipital cortex was weaker for individuals for whom the level of detail decreased with the passage of time when the external task did not require continuous monitoring of external information. These data provide novel evidence for how neural systems vary across subjects and may be underpin individual variation in the dynamics of thought, linking attention systems to the maintenance of task-relevant information, and the default mode network to supporting experiences with vivid detail.

Given the present commitment of the developed countries according to the Kyoto Pro- tocol, most published scenarios demonstrate that global greenhouse gases concentrations would not be stabilized at any level. In order to stabilize these concentrations, a deeper global involvement is needed. Taking Israel as an example of a 'recently-developed' country, we assess the role that such countries could play by assuming voluntary commitments in strengthening global involvement. This case as a model may encourage a global scheme for curbing carbon emissions, in which the more developed countries assume a stronger role and the less developed countries participate according to the principle of common but differentiated responsibility. The scheme builds on the inverse relation that exists between the per capita gross domestic product and the rate of increase of emissions due to economic growth. According to this theoretical scheme, the voluntary commitments assumed by the 'recently-developed' countries encourage the more developed countries to deepen their involvement by assuming more stringent reductions of emissions at home and transferring technological and financial means to the less developed countries. The proposed scheme would enable non-Annex I countries, both 'recently-developed' countries and less developed countries, to participate much earlier in the net mitigation of greenhouse gases.

The declared aim of the Israeli government, since 1996, was to reduce radically the presence in Israel of foreign overseas workers within five years. This aim has not been achieved due to a counteracting policy: yielding to strong political pressure, the government introduced regulations that virtually indentured legal overseas foreign workers indefinitely to their employers. This depressed their wages and transformed their employment into a source of easy gains, greatly increasing the demand for them and encouraging legal workers to turn illegal. As a result, their numbers have not declined significantly, even though the Israeli economy has been on a downtrend, most of the time, since 1997.

This paper presents a critique of the neoclassical view of the optimal use of renewable resources and offers an alternative view based on the method of classical thermodynamics. The presentation is forwarded via the issue of harvesting to extinction. Based on simple models, the traditional theory suggests that society would benefit from wiping out any renewable resource whose intrinsic growth rate, though positive, is smaller than the social rate of time preference. The latter is the rate society is using to discount its future benefits and costs. To bypass this ecologically implausible outcome, the simplistic assumptions have been modified in various ways. For example, either the costs or the benefits of harvesting have been made to depend on the stock of the resource as well as on the yield. The modifications offered make society less prone to wipe out resources intentionally, but they still disregard a more fundamental difficulty: The traditional theory is not consistent with the second law of thermodynamics; it describes a process that defies the second law, which no known system is able to be undergoing. No doubt, the theory should be challenged first and foremost on this ground, but none of the offered modifications is capable of annulling this inconsistency. A deeper change is needed because the social values of the resource as perceived by a society that behaves in manners consistent with the second law and as defined by the traditional theory necessarily differ. The paper identifies the socially consistent value and shows that harvesting to extinction is never optimal socially. Were society to follow the socially inconsistent value, it would always underestimate the importance of self-sustained resources. However, the unlikely refutability of the second law turns this possibility and the socially favored extinctions into arguable outcomes of an untenable theory rather than undesirable outcomes of a sound theory. Potentially growing renewable resources are wiped out in real life for various reasons, but when they are preyed to extinction, their unfortunate fate is an outcome of the dynamics of a socially unregulated system rather than a social objective coming to fruition.

A basic assumption of neoclassical macroeconomic theory is that in a market economy, consumers choose bundles of goods to maximize their budget-constrained utilities. A direct conclusion of this assumption is that in picking up their optimal bundles, consumers set their marginal utilities in proportion to the market prices of the goods consumed. In this paper, we show this type of behavior to contradict any behavioral pattern that is consistent with the second law of thermodynamics. This makes the “neoclassical consumer” the only system so far known to be able to evade the governance of this law. Should real consumers behave in agreement with the second law, their demands cannot satisfy the proportionality condition, and their marginal utilities cannot be determined solely by the prices. Since no real system has been found to violate the second law, and it is unlikely that one will ever be found, the need to revise consumer theory is there, even if empirically it has not yet been tested and refuted. JEL Classification: B41, D11

This study investigated selected cultural influences on probabilistic thinking of 11–12-year-old children in England. Language, beliefs and experience are shown to influence the children's “informal knowledge” of probability, i.e., the intuitive knowledge they bring to school and use in thinking about probabilistic situations presented in school. Some of the pupils' responses in interviews and in a questionnaire were consistent with the “outcome approach” and with the use of certain heuristics: “representativeness”; “availability”; “equiprobability.” A significant proportion of pupils revealed superstitions. Standard “random devices” such as dice were regarded by some children as subject to personal, religious or causative influences. In a comparison between two culturally-contrasted subgroups in the same school, we found significant differences in scores on probability tests, even when taking account of numerical and non-verbal ability. But the differences between the two groups could almost entirely be explained by differences in language ability.

Economic theory has always maintained that real economic value is generated solely within the economy where it is also completely distributed before being consumed. This view suggests that the economy operates as an economically closed system that requires no flows to pass across its boundaries in support of its steady state (‘general equilibrium’). From a thermodynamic point of view, this idea is unacceptable. An open system, which allows flows of matter and energy to cross its boundaries, is able to maintain itself in steady state only because it ‘transports’ real value to restore the value that has been ‘consumed’ within the system and dissipated. Drawing on the analogy with thermodynamics, this paper replaces the traditional systemic analog of the economy, which is the closed ‘circular flow’ process, with the steady flow process. This analog suggests that the economy is an open system both physically and economically that requires the flow of net real economic value to maintain its steady state. This economy is shown to satisfy, without reservations, the principles of the Bohm-Bawerk theory of capital. Because the behavior of the economy that is predicted by the two alternative viewpoints is different, the observed variables of the economy may be compared with the predicted ones to address a central question for the study of optimal resource allocations: Does human welfare dissipate and need to be restored or can it be fully recovered within the economy? Although empirical evidence is needed to answer this question, the theory demonstrates that the welfare function of any efficient system assigns the inflows and outflows with nonzero real values. Hence, an economically closed system is inefficient. Thus, if empirical evidence shows the economy to behave efficiently, parts of traditional economic theory, especially those based on the assumption that in equilibrium real values and exchange prices are proportional, will have to be modified.

Welfare is a measure of the well-being of society. It is sustainable if it can be maintained steadily for many years. According to neoclassical economic theory, value—that is, the flow of welfare attributed to the totality of available outputs—is generated, distributed, and consumed solely within the economy. When environmental externalities are absent, or after they have been internalized, environment-derived welfare is constant, and no environmental costs need be incurred to sustain economy-derived welfare. Hence, resource accumulation and technological progress enable society to experience sustainable development futures where its welfare always increases, possibly exponentially. Thermodynamics generates an alternative theory of value. Drawing on this theory, I show that the sum of the economy-derived and environment-derived welfare is not affected by the location of the boundaries between the economy and the environment. Hence, to recognize their contribution to welfare, environmental resources need not be internalized into the economy. According to thermodynamics-based theory, economy-derived welfare may be sustained only because the economy is able to transport net value from its environment to restore the value that is necessarily consumed within it. Hence, the environmental costs of sustaining welfare are always positive. They increase with the welfare to be sustained and decrease as a consequence of technological advance. Since part of these costs will never disappear, the room for better technologies cannot be exhausted. Once solar power is fully utilized, future increase of welfare will be guided by the rate of adoption of more efficient technologies that slow down the economic process. Although welfare is bounded asymptotically and its steady growth is precluded, economy-derived welfare and the corresponding environmental costs are determined by social decisions rather than by immutable laws of nature.

Economic theory has always maintained that economic value is “generated” solely within the economy where it is fully distributed among the factors of production before being “consumed”. According to this theory, the economy is an isolated system that does not need flows to pass across its boundaries in support of its steady state (“general equilibrium”). From a thermodynamic point of view this idea is unacceptable. According to thermodynamic theory, any open system, which allows flows of matter and energy to cross its boundaries, is capable of maintaining itself in steady state only because it “transport” value from its environment to restore the value that has been “consumed” within the system and dissipated. Drawing on the analogy with thermodynamics, this paper replaces the traditional systemic analog of the economy, which is the closed “circular flow” process, with the steady flow process. According to this analog, any efficient economy is an open system both physically and economically requiring a “flow” of economic value to maintain its steady state. In other words, an economically isolated system has to be inefficient and is bound to misallocate and overuse environmental resources. Whether the economy behaves as an economically isolated (inefficient) or open (efficient) system is an empirical question. However, if real economies are economically open and efficient, and environmental resources are abused due to the economy's unrestrained material growth, parts of traditional economic theory, espicially those related to benefit evaluation, will have to be modified. Policy recommendations will be affected in any case because internalization, the panacea of resource misallocations, cannot be more than a temporary solution. Instead of opening the economy, internalization encloses the harmed resource and saves it by abusing excessively other environmental resources.

The paper describes a policy tool capable of solving and evaluating cost-effective policies for the optimal allocation of a region's air-shed resources among competing pollution sources. It is designed specifically to evaluate the economic implications of changes in ambient air-quality standards, the use of alternative abatement technologies or different pollution control approaches. The highly-polluted air-shed of the metropolitan region of the Haifa Bay area in northern Israel has been selected for testing the usefulness of the model. The policy analysis tool is a PC software package. It is flexible, user-friendly planning model for evaluating alternative scenarios involving changes in policy parameters. It consists of an optimization module (a mixed integer programming model), a pollution dispersion module and an interface module, which connects these two modules together, and serves as an interface between them and the user, via a sequence of menu screens.

The health and integrity of an ecosystem is a multifaceted concept. It can become operational and of use in setting environmental policies once it is backed up by a theory that explicates the basic mechanisms of ecosystem functioning in response to stress. Despite the fact that ecosystem health remains a theoretical construct, the theory proposes a set of observed variables, basically the biotic stocks and flows of the ecosystem, empowered by a computable model, that give rise to operational and diagnostic measures of ecosystem health. The proposed measures are shown to correlate well with several other qualitative and quantitative measures of ecosystem health.