Unpublished Works

Several articles remain unpublished because they have been rejected by journals in most cases 2-3 times. A common feature of these papers is that they contradicted what is deemed to be acceptable in various Social Science academic disciplines. Though this may be the case, I believe the methodologies developed in these papers are sound and the empirical results provide some useful insights.

Featured unpublished articles include:

Patterson, M.G, Wake, G.C. and O’Connor, M. (2012). Sraffa Prices, Uneven Rates of Profit and Systems Not Necessarily at General Equilibrium.

Downloadable Here.

Sraffa’s system of price determination can be seen as suggestive of a general equilibrium model of the economy, simply because the sectors have the same profit rates. This paper shows that the existence of these same profit rates can be no more than an artefact of the Eigendecomposition method conventionally used to solve Sraffas equations. In this regard, it is shown that the more generalised Singular Value Decomposition method not only relaxes this assumption of equal profit rates, but also provides an explicit basis for testing the presence of even or uneven profit rates.

This paper is controversial because many followers of Sraffa as well as some prominent neoclassical economists, consider Sraffa prices are equilibrium prices, whereas this paper concludes that this will almost always not be the case.

Flintoft, A, Patterson, M.G. (2008) Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men: A Quality Evaluation of National Drug Policy and Planning Documents in New Zealand

Downloadable Here

This paper evaluates the ‘quality’ of documents on alcohol and drug policy that were released by the New Zealand government from 2001 to 2007. The methodology used was based on extending and adapting the methodology developed by Berke et al. (1999).

Almost all of the ‘policy documents’ scored poorly in terms of the inter-related areas of: Monitoring, Effective Implementation, Budgetary and Economic Feasibility, and Stakeholder & Public Consultation. On the other hand, most policy documents scored comparatively strongly in the areas of: Mandate, Clarity of Purpose, Internal Consistency and External Consistency.

Overall, the best ‘policy documents’ were found to be the ‘National Strategic Framework for Alcohol and Drug Services’ released in 2001, and the second ‘National Drug Policy’ released in 2007.

This paper was criticised by reviewers for using a quantitative method to score the overall quality of each policy document. One reviewer also criticised the paper as being “boring” and “not telling a story”. Unapologetically our approach is not to tell stories, but to as much as we can objectively look at the evidence.

Patterson, M.G (1994) Commensuration of Performances Across Subjects Using Simultaneous Equations

Downloadable Here

This paper develops a  mathematical methodology for comparing the difficulty of gaining marks in various subjects. The methodology was applied to New Zealand School Certificate results in 1990 where students gained numerical scores in any subject out of 100 – this is no longer the case with the introduction of NCEA. The method involves solving simultaneous linear equations to determine; (1) the ‘difficulty’ of gaining marks in each subject (alpha factor), (2)  the ‘calibre’ or general ability of each student from each subject (beta factor), (3) the ‘differential performance’ or specific ability of students in particular subjects (lamda factor). By applying this methodology to School Certificate results for 1990, it is shown that students sitting exams for foreign languages (Russian, Latin, Indonesian, German, French, Japanese), Physics and Chemistry consistently scored higher in other subject areas. Whereas students undertaking Workshop Technology, Home Economics, Woodwork and Human Biology consistently scored lower in other subject areas.

This paper was rejected for unspecified reasons  – maybe because the results were unpalatable because it showed some subjects are ‘harder’ to past than others. Technically, the result showed that ‘general ability’ (beta factor) was far more dominant than ‘specific ability’ (lamda factor), which could be against the dominant ethos in modem-day  educational circles.