IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/phsmap/v376y2007icp601-608.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The fatigue of high office

Author

Listed:
  • Ramsden, Jeremy J.
  • Naran, Deven

Abstract

The word frequencies of the speeches of some contemporary politicians have been determined over a decade of office. By fitting Mandelbrot's simple canonical law (a development of Zipf's law) to the data, the average cybernetic temperature θ was determined for each year of office. Two contrasting cases were examined. The first, that of the British Prime Minister Tony Blair, showed a steady decline of θ punctuated by partial recovery following certain key events such as re-election. The second, that of the Australian Prime Minister John Howard, showed a more uniform temperature. It is suggested that the first case is an example of the phenomenon of fatigue or habituation, inevitable in any complex system rich in equilibrium states, and the partial de-habituation observed is a consequence of a sharp disturbance to the system. Given the relative ease of carrying out the analysis, it could become a routine tool regularly applied to holders of high office to determine their continuing fitness to occupy the office.

Suggested Citation

  • Ramsden, Jeremy J. & Naran, Deven, 2007. "The fatigue of high office," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 376(C), pages 601-608.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:376:y:2007:i:c:p:601-608
    DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2006.10.076
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437106011514
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.physa.2006.10.076?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Ramsden, J.J. & Kiss-Haypál, Gy., 2000. "Company size distribution in different countries," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 277(1), pages 220-227.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Musa, Hussam & Krištofík, Peter & Medzihorský, Juraj & Klieštik, Tomáš, 2024. "The development of firm size distribution – Evidence from four Central European countries," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 91(C), pages 98-110.
    2. Luis Garicano & Claire Lelarge & John Van Reenen, 2016. "Firm Size Distortions and the Productivity Distribution: Evidence from France," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 106(11), pages 3439-3479, November.
    3. Alex Coad, 2010. "The Exponential Age Distribution and the Pareto Firm Size Distribution," Journal of Industry, Competition and Trade, Springer, vol. 10(3), pages 389-395, September.
    4. Ausloos, Marcel & Clippe, Paulette & Pȩkalski, Andrzej, 2003. "Simple model for the dynamics of correlations in the evolution of economic entities under varying economic conditions," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 324(1), pages 330-337.
    5. Fujimoto, Shouji & Ishikawa, Atushi & Mizuno, Takayuki & Watanabe, Tsutomu, 2011. "A new method for measuring tail exponents of firm size distributions," Economics Discussion Papers 2011-29, Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel).
    6. Hernández-Pérez, R. & Angulo-Brown, F. & Tun, Dionisio, 2006. "Company size distribution for developing countries," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 359(C), pages 607-618.
    7. Pascoal, Rui & Augusto, Mário & Monteiro, A.M., 2016. "Size distribution of Portuguese firms between 2006 and 2012," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 458(C), pages 342-355.
    8. Pasquale Cirillo & Mauro Gallegati, 2012. "The Empirical Validation of an Agent-based Model," Eastern Economic Journal, Palgrave Macmillan;Eastern Economic Association, vol. 38(4), pages 525-547.
    9. Maurizio Naldi & Marta Flamini, 2017. "Censoring and Distortion in the Hirschman–Herfindahl Index Computation," Economic Papers, The Economic Society of Australia, vol. 36(4), pages 401-415, December.
    10. Didier Sornette & Thomas Maillart & Giacomo Ghezzi, 2014. "How Much Is the Whole Really More than the Sum of Its Parts? 1 ⊞ 1 = 2.5: Superlinear Productivity in Collective Group Actions," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 9(8), pages 1-15, August.
    11. Carlo Bianchi & Pasquale Cirillo & Mauro Gallegati & Pietro Vagliasindi, 2007. "Validating and Calibrating Agent-Based Models: A Case Study," Computational Economics, Springer;Society for Computational Economics, vol. 30(3), pages 245-264, October.
    12. Ciola, Emanuele & Turco, Enrico & Gurgone, Andrea & Bazzana, Davide & Vergalli, Sergio & Menoncin, Francesco, 2023. "Enter the MATRIX model:a Multi-Agent model for Transition Risks with application to energy shocks," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 146(C).
    13. Ying Fan & Menghui Li & Zengru Di, 2004. "Increasing Returns to Scale, Dynamics of Industrial Structure and Size Distribution of Firms," Papers cond-mat/0407383, arXiv.org.
    14. Bai, Chong-En & Mao, Jie & Zhang, Qiong, 2014. "Measuring market concentration in China: the problem with using censored data and its rectification," China Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 30(C), pages 432-447.
    15. Vandermarliere, B. & Ryckebusch, J. & Schoors, K. & Cauwels, P. & Sornette, D., 2017. "Discrete hierarchy of sizes and performances in the exchange-traded fund universe," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 469(C), pages 111-123.
    16. Inna MANAEVA & Svetlana RASTVORTSEVA, 2016. "Zipf'S Law As Assessment Tool Of Urban Inequality," Regional Science Inquiry, Hellenic Association of Regional Scientists, vol. 0(3), pages 19-30, December.
    17. Hernández-Pérez, R., 2010. "An analogy of the size distribution of business firms with Bose–Einstein statistics," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 389(18), pages 3837-3843.
    18. Yannick Malevergne & Pedro Santa-Clara & Didier Sornette, 2009. "Professor Zipf goes to Wall Street," NBER Working Papers 15295, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    19. Y. Malevergne & D. Sornette, 2007. "A two-Factor Asset Pricing Model and the Fat Tail Distribution of Firm Sizes," Papers physics/0702027, arXiv.org.
    20. Atushi Ishikawa & Shouji Fujimoto & Takayuki Mizuno & Tsutomu Watanabe, 2017. "Dependence of the decay rate of firm activities on firm age," Evolutionary and Institutional Economics Review, Springer, vol. 14(2), pages 351-362, December.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:376:y:2007:i:c:p:601-608. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/physica-a-statistical-mechpplications/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.