Pollution and the Firm is an important book which presents new concepts of the marginal cost of substituting non-pollutive for pollutive goods. Technical in its approach it complements the other literature in the field and will be a significant contribution to the understanding of microeconomic issues in pollution control. The book focuses on three main concepts: substitutions in consumption, emission abatement and exposure avoidance. The first part considers the adjustment of the scope and combination of goods produced as a method for controlling pollution. The author argues that pollution is controlled by increasing the relative price of the polluting good in the production process; thereby reducing demand and subsequent production of the good. In the second part the discussion is extended to include the possibilities of preventing or abating emissions in relation to three models: first, pollution prevention when non-polluting inputs and processes are substituted for pollutants; second, when a proportion of the polluting output is recycled rather than being discarded; and finally end-of-pipe abatement where additional technology is used. In conclusion the author assesses the extent to which pollution damage is controlled by avoidance of emissions, with avoidance being modelled as an add-on technology with its own returns to scale. This important book combines theories of the firm with a welfare economics approach to pollution control, and will be welcomed by environmental and resource economists as well as microeconomists with an interest in environmental issues.

The artist, Leila Daw, and the critic, Robert E. Kohn, discover some mutually binding interests. In her artworks, ostensibly exploring the concepts of mapping, Kohn recognizes the brightly colored dots, zigzags, grids, sets of parallel lines, and nested curves that pulsate in the Paleolithic cave paintings, suggesting that her art-enabling genes carry the memory of those geometric forms from tens of thousands of years ago. She had not been aware of this influence on her work and excitedly wonders "if this is why I'm so interested in ancient sites and paleolithic and neolithic art." When Kohn detects her subtle effort to portray three dimensions together with two in the same artwork, she joyfully responds "thank you for this " Daw's respect for levels of dimensionality along with her joyous use of thick paint and tactile effects reveal the skepticism of Abstract Expressionism that she shares with Kohn. This book deals with contemporary art criticism, cave paintings, Jean Clottes, Clement Greenberg, Fibonacci series, genes and genetic memory, Paleolithic cosmology, mapping and shamanism.

Bill Kohn's painting Udaipur Tinsmiths contrasts his own aesthetic preferences with that of his adversary Clement Greenberg by exaggerating their differences with parody and pastiche. This is a typical Postmodern approach for repudiating claims, like Greenberg's, of narrow rules Modernist artists must follow to ensure the legitimacy of their work. In the case of Abstract Expressionism and Post Painterly Abstraction, based on Robert E. Kohn's reading of Andreas Huyssen, Postmodernism failed. Though it was justified in rejecting Modernism, "such rejection," Huyssen argued (page 49), affects only that trend within Modernism which has been codified into a narrow dogma, not Modernism as such. In some ways, the story of Modernism and Postmodernism is like the story of the hedgehog and the hare: the hare could not win because there always was more than just one hedgehog. But the hare was still the better runner. Greenberg had no trouble attracting artists, but my brother was the better runner.

It is generally presumed that the narrator of Kate Chopin's The Awakening is a single individual, anonymous, and for the most part aligned with the author. Kohn argues that this novel is better understood if specific co-narrators are presumed, namely Charles Darwin, Walt Whitman, Elise Miltenberger, and Sigmund Freud. Darwin's presence sharpens the contrast between those characters in The Awakening who exhibit the genetically driven, adaptive behavior that enabled early humans to survive, as opposed to those characters who do not. The motives for Edna Pontellier's suicide are less than convincing, in part because it was inspired by lines from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, which romanticize the ocean's invitation. Mademoiselle Reisz is likely Jewish-that particular characters in The Awakening consider her a disagreeable person may be compounded by an atmosphere of antisemitism. One of the Sacred Heart sisters who fought against the Vatican's antisemitism was Chopin's childhood friend Elise Miltenberger. Emil Kraepelin might have been a better choice for Chopin's co-narrator in the area of mental disorders.. Although Freud has lost credibility having felt "obliged to recognize that, in so far as one can speak of determining causes which lead to the acquisition of neuroses, their etiology is to be looked for in sexual factors," the general belief today favors Kraepelin's inclination to look for physical origins. Kohn suggests that Kate Chopin's remarkable obsession with her lover Albert Sampite may have been some kind of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, strange enough to involve both Freud's sexual factors and Kraepelin's physical origins. This book covers topics including Antisemitism, Bipolar Disorder, Kate Chopin, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Emil Kraepelin, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Mother Superior Miltenberger, suicide and Walt Whitman.

This book, a polemical response to the dystopian direction that politics and economics have taken in the United States, is a combination of literary criticism and economic theory. It draws on the Latin poem Psychomachia by Prudentius, a citizen of the Roman Empire who lived through the last half of the fourth century into the beginning of the fifth, and on the 1959 groundbreaking graduate text on Public Finance by Richard Musgrave, which comes closest to infusing the present polemicist with the economic equivalent of what Prudentius called "Worship-of-the-Old-Gods." Kohn's "Old-Gods" are Allocative-Efficiency, Distributional-Equity, Inheritance-Taxation, Progressive-Tax-Rates, Paying-Down-the-Debt-When-the-Economy-Heats, Employment-Stabilization, and Optimal-Debt.

A strange woman walks into church in the middle of a prayer - to get out of the rain, reasons Reverend John Ames. Sixty-seven years old, he is captivated by the young woman, some 40 years his junior, and not many months later marries her. Robert E. Kohn, literary critic, argues that Ames knew this woman when she was a girl, knew her past "to death," as the narrator claims, but for all purposes remained "completely ignorant of it." This is because the truth is couched in secrecy. As the secrecy unfolds, "this poor gray ember of Creation," which Ames calls himself, "turns to radiance."

This book provides numerous new interpretations of Thomas Pynchon's THE CRYING OF LOT 49, arguably the most epistemologically complex novel, page for page, ever written. One of the continuing surprises of the 1960s was that such a novel was destined to become a blockbuster. The continual flow of new editions demonstrates that THE CRYING OF LOT 49 has remained a major seller well into the first decade of the 21st century. It is not surprising that J. Kerry Grant reported that some "Forty years after its first publication, THE CRYING OF LOT 49] is still selling at the rate of between fifteen and twenty thousand copies annually." Kohn's close readings of Pynchon's novel draw on writings by Henry Adams, Roland Barthes, Rachel Carson, Charles Darwin, Loren Eiseley, W.Y. Evans-Wentz, E.M. Forster, Don DeLillo, F.R. Leavis, Paul Virilio and Jerry Wilkerson.