THE UTILITARIAN FOUNDATIONS OF THE ECONOMIC APPROACH TO HUMAN BEHAVIOR.

The economic approach to the study of human behavior has been presented by its foremost representative as the most effective method of studying social phenomena. Gary Becker´s view supposes that, on the one hand, all social phenomena can be explained as a consequence of individual actions and, on the other, there is a stable pattern of individual behavior economics has been able to understand thoroughly. Hence, economics, according to this view, is no longer limited to the study of a certain domain of human actions or to the understanding of material wealth or the necessary conditions for the material reproduction of society. Economics is a method that gives the social scientist the necessary tools to understand and even transform the world that surrounds him/her. Becker clearly acknowledges the direct link between his approach and Jeremy Bentham´s theory. Beyond the apparent connections regarding their conception of human nature there is one central point that links the two authors: their view of economics as an attitude of the human mind, an inherent capacity to calculate that explains all human actions. This paper argues that Bentham provides the philosophical groundings for Becker´s theory. The application of the principle of utility to every aspect of human behavior justifies economic imperialism by transforming economics into a method of general analysis of human behavior. Indeed, economics is no longer defined according to its subject matter but according to its method, which means an increasing scope explaining Becker´s claim that the economic approach provides a rigorous framework for the analysis of all social phenomena.Gary Becker

Symmetry and the thermodynamics of currents in open quantum systems

Symmetry is a powerful concept in physics, and its recent application to understand nonequilibrium behavior is providing deep insights and groundbreaking exact results. Here we show how to harness symmetry to control transport and statistics in open quantum systems. Such control is enabled by a first-order-type dynamic phase transition in current statistics and the associated coexistence of different transport channels (or nonequilibrium steady states) classified by symmetry. Microreversibility then ensues, via the Gallavotti-Cohen fluctuation theorem, a twin dynamic phase transition for rare current fluctuations. Interestingly, the symmetry present in the initial state is spontaneously broken at the fluctuating level, where the quantum system selects the symmetry sector that maximally facilitates a given fluctuation. We illustrate these results in a qubit network model motivated by the problem of coherent energy harvesting in photosynthetic complexes, and introduce the concept of a symmetry-controlled quantum thermal switch, suggesting symmetry-based design strategies for quantum devices with controllable transport properties.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figure

On contractible edges in convex decompositions

Let $\Pi$ be a convex decomposition of a set $P$ of $n\geq 3$ points in general position in the plane. If $\Pi$ consists of more than one polygon, then either $\Pi$ contains a deletable edge or $\Pi$ contains a contractible edge

Witness Gabriel Graphs

We consider a generalization of the Gabriel graph, the witness Gabriel graph. Given a set of vertices P and a set of witnesses W in the plane, there is an edge ab between two points of P in the witness Gabriel graph GG-(P,W) if and only if the closed disk with diameter ab does not contain any witness point (besides possibly a and/or b). We study several properties of the witness Gabriel graph, both as a proximity graph and as a new tool in graph drawing.Comment: 23 pages. EuroCG 200