Exploitation in Contemporary Capitalism: An Empirical Analysis of the Case of Taiwan

Abstract

Using data for manufacturing firms in Taiwan, we developed a measure of exploitation and analyzed its prevalence in the labor force. Our results indicated that almost two-thirds of the firms in our sample exploit at least some of their workers. For these firms, the average profit rate is 34 percent, but three-fourths of this figure derives from the expropriated wages of their workers. Female and blue-collar workers are the largest groups that are underpaid relative to their productivity (that is, exploited). Managers, professionals, and workers with seniority are not exploited by our definition because our data showed that these groups are paid according to the market value of their productivity, at least on average. Our analysis demonstrates the feasibility of the empirical investigation of exploitation, which should be further considered in future research.     

Time Series Classification Based on Spectral Analysis

For time series data with obvious periodicity (e.g., electric motor systems and cardiac monitor) or vague periodicity (e.g., earthquake and explosion, speech, and stock data), frequency-based techniques using the spectral analysis can usually capture the features of the series. By this approach, we are able not only to reduce the data dimensions into frequency domain but also utilize these frequencies by general classification methods such as linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and k-nearest-neighbor (KNN) to classify the time series. This is a combination of two classical approaches. However, there is a difficulty in using LDA and KNN in frequency domain due to excessive dimensions of data. We overcome the obstacle by using Singular Value Decomposition to select essential frequencies. Two data sets are used to illustrate our approach. The classification error rates of our simple approach are comparable to those of several more complicated methods.     

Adaptive tangent distance classifier on recognition of handwritten digits

Simard et al. [16 Simard, P. Y., LeCun, Y., Denker, J. S. and Victorri, B. 2000. Transformation invariance in pattern recognition: Tangent distance and tangent propagation. J. Imaging Syst. Technol., 11: 181–197.  [Google Scholar] 17 Sona, D., Sperduti, A. and Starita, A. 1997. A constructive learning algorithm for discriminant tangent models. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems. 1997, Cambridge, MA. Edited by: Mozer, M. C., Jordan, M. I. and Petsche, T. Vol. 9, pp.786–792. MIT Press.  [Google Scholar]] proposed a transformation distance called “tangent distance” (TD) which can make pattern recognition be efficient. The key idea is to construct a distance measure which is invariant with respect to some chosen transformations. In this research, we provide a method using adaptive TD based on an idea inspired by “discriminant adaptive nearest neighbor” [7 Hastie, T., Tibshirani, R. and Friedman, J. 2009. The Elements of Statistical Learning, Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction, 2, New York, Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer. Available at http://www-stat.stanford.edu/ElemStatLearn [Google Scholar]]. This method is relatively easy compared with many other complicated ones. A real handwritten recognition data set is used to illustrate our new method. Our results demonstrate that the proposed method gives lower classification error rates than those by standard implementation of neural networks and support vector machines and is as good as several other complicated approaches.