title: Lawrence, Kansas

text: Centennial Park, between 6th and 9th Streets and Rockledge Road and Iowa Street, was established in 1954 for the city's 100th anniversary. The park features rolling hills, a skatepark, a disc golf course and a Polaris missile constructed during the Cold War. Sesquicentennial Park is near Clinton Lake and was established for Lawrence's 150th anniversary and is mostly undeveloped but features a timeline of Lawrence history and a time capsule to be opened in 2054.


title: Lawrence, Kansas

text: Liberty Hall was built when the Bowersock Opera House burned down in 1911. Liberty Hall is a theater typically showcasing independent movies and frequent live acts. Liberty Hall also runs a video rental next door. The Granada Theater was originally built in 1928 as a vaudeville theater. It was renovated in 1934 as a movie theater until closing in 1989. It was renovated again in 1993 and opened as a venue for comedy acts and live music.


title: Lawrence, Kansas

text: The Eldridge Hotel was first built in 1855 as the Free State Hotel. During the 1855 sack of Lawrence, the hotel was burned to the ground, and its ruins were purchased by Col. Shalor Eldridge, who rebuilt it and named it the Eldridge House. This version of the structure was destroyed during Quantrill's Raid, but once again Eldridge rebuilt it. In 1925, this structure was completely renovated, and in 1970, the hotel was converted into apartments. In 1985, work began to renovate the Eldridge and turn it back into a hotel, and in 2004 the building was sold and completely renovated back to its 1925 look. It is a popular rumor that the ghost of Eldridge haunts the hotel.


title: Lawrence, Kansas

text: Memorial Stadium and Allen Fieldhouse are on KU campus. Memorial Stadium was built in 1920 for the Kansas Jayhawks football program. It was named to honor KU students who died in World War I. Allen Fieldhouse was built in 1955 for the basketball program and was named for Phog Allen, a coach at KU from 1907 to 1909 and 1919 to 1956. On November 4, 2010, the ESPN's online publication, "The Magazine", named Allen Fieldhouse the loudest college basketball arena in the country, whilst prominent sportswriter, Mark Whicker, has publicly declared the fieldhouse is "the best place in America to watch college basketball."


title: Lawrence, Kansas

text: Oak Hill Cemetery in east Lawrence was established in 1866 and was called by William Allen White the "Kansas Arlington." The cemetery features the burials of James Lane, Lucy Hobbs Taylor, Langston Hughes' grandparents, numerous veterans and many prominent Kansans. Across the street is Memorial Park Cemetery which features a memorial for KU coach and inventor of basketball James Naismith. The memorial is a cenotaph but Naismith is buried in the mason section of Memorial Park.


title: Lawrence, Kansas

text: Lawrence is also the site of many historic houses related to the history of the city. The Robert Miller house survived Quantrill's Raid and was a stop on the Underground Railroad, Ferdinand Fuller, an original settler of Lawrence, built his house atop of Windmill Hill in what is now the Hillcrest Neighborhood and the John Roberts House, commonly called the Castle Tea Room, was designed by famed architect John G. Haskell in 1894 and is now used for various formal events. There are many other houses of historic prominence in Lawrence, many of them on the National Register of Historic Places.


title: Lawrence, Kansas

text: The city is known for a thriving music and art scene. "Rolling Stone" named Lawrence one of the "best lil' college towns" in the country in its August 11, 2005, issue. "The New York Times" said Lawrence had "the most vital music scene between Chicago and Denver" in a travel column on February 25, 2005. Locally owned bar and music venue The Replay Lounge was named one of "Esquire" magazine's top 25 bars/venues in the country in 2007.


title: Lawrence, Kansas

text: The Lied Center of Kansas presents Broadway musicals, internationally touring dance companies and headline artists such as The Beach Boys, Kristin Chenoweth, Lyle Lovett and Kansas.


title: Lawrence, Kansas

text: In December 2005, the city announced International Dadaism Month, celebrating the early 20th century art movement. In the spirit of Dada, rather than select a typical calendar month for the occasion, Mayor Dennis "Boog" Highberger set the dates for the "Month" as February 4, March 28, April 1, July 15, August 2, August 7, August 16, August 26, September 18, September 22, October 1, October 17, and October 26, determined by rolling dice and pulling numbers out of a hat.


title: Lawrence, Kansas

text: Lawrence is home to many bands and record labels. Many artists, such as Paw, Mates of State, The New Amsterdams, Kansas, Fourth of July, White Flight, The Anniversary, Minus Story, The Appleseed Cast, Old Canes, Ad Astra Per Aspera, Ghosty, The Esoteric and The Get Up Kids originated in Lawrence or its surrounding areas. KJHK 90.7 FM, the University of Kansas's student-run radio station, is a staple of the local music scene. It won a CMJ award in 2006 for "most improved station," and it was nominated for a Plug Award for best college radio station in 2007.


title: Lawrence, Kansas

text: The Wakarusa Music and Camping Festival was a four-day-long weekend music festival held annually in early June just outside Lawrence, at Clinton State Park. After its inception in 2004, the festival grew dramatically by 2006, with almost 60,000 tickets sold, and developed a nationwide following that accounted for 80% of ticket sales. The festival featured an eclectic mix of music, with artists like The Flaming Lips, Wilco, STS9, Medeski, Martin and Wood, Neko Case, and Widespread Panic taking the stage. The event is kept smaller than other festivals such as Bonnaroo by an agreement with the state. Activities other than music include disc golf, yoga, hiking, and swimming in Clinton Lake. The festival was relocated to Mulberry Mountain due to a dispute between the organizers and the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks over limiting attendees and over rent payment.


title: Lawrence, Kansas

text: Lawrence is home to the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction, the first research center in the world dedicated to science fiction studies. Since 1969, the center has offered courses and workshops in science fiction literature and writing, hosted an annual conference, brought speakers to Lawrence, and presented multiple annual awards and scholarships.


title: Lawrence, Kansas

text: Every year since 1959, on the third Thursday of July there is the Massachusetts Street "sidewalk sale," which most businesses on Massachusetts Street offer discounts on their merchandise. The sale is often supplemented by band performances or radio stations playing during the event.


title: Lawrence, Kansas

text: Lawrence is also the home of the University of Kansas (KU) athletic teams. The perennially highly ranked Kansas Jayhawks basketball team (1922 and 1923 Helms Foundation National Champions and 1952, 1988, 2008, and 2022 NCAA Champions) is closely followed by most residents during the winter. Massachusetts Street, the primary street of downtown Lawrence, flooded with fans in 2002, 2003, 2008, and 2012 after both KU's victories and defeats in the final rounds of the NCAA tournaments those years. KU's football team had their best record in their school history in the 2007–2008 season going 12–1 and culminating with a victory in the Orange Bowl. The city honored the university's mascot, the Jayhawk, in 2003 when 30 statues of Jayhawks were commissioned by the Lawrence Convention and Visitors Bureau; these can be seen throughout the city as part of an art installation called "Jayhawks on Parade." The Jayhawks also field a soccer team, baseball and softball teams, track and field teams, cross country teams, and a men's club hockey team. KU also has a club rugby team, run by the KU Rugby Football club, with a clubhouse in North Johnny's Tavern. They also run the high school and the club team.


title: Lawrence, Kansas

text: Lawrence is run by a city commission and city manager. Commissioners consists of five individuals elected by the citizens. Three commissioner seats are up for reelection every two years. The two top vote-getters receive a four-year term, third-place finisher receives a two-year term. The commission elects a mayor and vice-mayor every year in April, usually the two top vote-getters, and also hires the city manager. Lawrence uses plurality-at-large voting (also known as block voting) for its municipal elections, whereby voters may choose up to three candidates for office.


title: Lawrence, Kansas

text: While Kansas is a heavily Republican state, Lawrence is often considered a bastion of the modern Democratic Party, and has been since the late 1980s. Douglas County, where Lawrence is situated, was one of only two counties in Kansas whose majority voted for John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election, one of only three that voted for Barack Obama in the 2008 election and one of the only two counties to vote for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. Douglas County has supported the Democratic candidate for the past seven presidential elections.


title: Lawrence, Kansas

text: Lawrence is served by Democratic state representatives Christina Haswood, Mike Amyx, Barbara Ballard and Dennis "Boog" Highberger, and by Democratic state senators Marci Francisco, and Tom Holland. Lawrence is represented federally by Republican Jake LaTurner of the 2nd and U.S. Senators Roger Marshall and Jerry Moran, both Republicans. Prior to 2002, Lawrence sat entirely within the 3rd district until reapportionment split Lawrence between the 2nd and 3rd districts. In 2012, Lawrence was placed entirely within the 2nd district.


title: Lawrence, Kansas

text: Lawrence was the first city in Kansas to enact an ordinance (enacted in 1995, after a campaign called Simply Equal) prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. On October 4, 2011, Lawrence became the first city in Kansas to prohibit discrimination based on gender identity with the passage of City Ordinance No. 8672. The effort to pass the GIO was led by Scott Criqui from the Kansas Equality Coalition. Scott Criqui would go on to become the first openly gay candidate to run for office and win a primary in Lawrence. Douglas County was the only county in Kansas to reject the amendment to the Kansas Constitution prohibiting both gay marriage and civil unions in April 2005. The vote against the amendment was primarily in the city of Lawrence; outside the city in the rest of Douglas County, the amendment carried. Lawrence has an active chapter of the Kansas Equality Coalition, which persuaded the city commission to approve a domestic partner registry on May 22, 2007. The registry, which took effect on August 1, 2007, provides unmarried couples —both same-sex and other-sex— some recognition by the city for legal purposes.


title: Lawrence, Kansas

text: The community is mainly served by Lawrence USD 497 public school district, which has thirteen grade schools, four middle schools. and two high schools. The city's 13 public elementary schools include: Langston Hughes Elementary (named after Langston Hughes); Quail Run Elementary, Broken Arrow Elementary, Cordley Elementary (named after Richard Cordley), Hillcrest Elementary, Kennedy Early Childhood (formerly Kennedy Elementary, closed in 2021), Pinckney Elementary, Prairie Park Elementary, New York Elementary, Schwegler Elementary, Sunflower Elementary, Sunset Hill Elementary, Woodlawn Elementary, and Deerfield Elementary. The middle schools include: Liberty Memorial Central (formerly Liberty Memorial High School and later Central Junior High), West, Billy Mills (named after Billy Mills, and formerly named South), and Southwest. The high schools include: Lawrence High School and Lawrence Free State High School (the athletic teams of the former are nicknamed the Chesty Lions, and those of the latter are the Firebirds). Newer developments in the northwestern part of Lawrence are within the boundaries for Perry-Lecompton School District, and students in this area attend Lecompton Elementary, Perry Elementary, Perry-Lecompton Middle School, and Perry-Lecompton High School.


title: Lawrence, Kansas

text: Private schools include Bishop Seabury Academy (grades 6 to 12) (affiliate of Episcopal Church), Veritas Christian School (grades pre-K to 12) (interdenominational), St. John Catholic School (grades pre-K to 8), Corpus Christi Catholic School (grades pre-K to 8), Raintree Montessori School (grades pre-K to 8) (Montessori school), Prairie Moon School (grades pre-K to 8) (Waldorf school), and Limestone Community School (as of 2022, grades K to 2).


title: Lawrence, Kansas

text: The University of Kansas is the largest public university in the state with total enrollment of just more than 30,000 students (including approximately 3,000 students at the KU Medical Center in Kansas City, KS). A Big 12 school, the University of Kansas has more than 170 fields of study and the nationally known Kansas Jayhawks athletics programs. Haskell Indian Nations University offers free tuition to members of registered Native American tribes. However, students are required to pay semester fees similar to many other colleges in the United States. It has an average enrollment of more than 1,000 (with students hailing from all 50 U.S. states and from over 150 tribes). Haskell University is also the home of the American Indian Athletic Hall of Fame and the Haskell Cultural Center. Several private Christian colleges and schools are in Lawrence as well, such as Heritage Baptist College.


title: Lawrence, Kansas

text: In 2011, Lawrence was named one of America's 10 best college towns by Parents & Colleges. Lawrence also was included in lists of top college towns in 2010 by the American Institute for Economic Research, MSN and MSNBC.


title: Lawrence, Kansas

text: The first library in Lawrence was started in October 1854 and was a subscription library costing $1 a year. After the Lawrence Massacre destroyed the library, a new one was started in 1865 and placed under city jurisdiction in 1871. In 1902, Peter Emery successfully got a grant from Andrew Carnegie to build a new library at 9th and Vermont Streets. The Lawrence Public Library opened in 1904. A new library to replace the aging and outdated Carnegie Building was completed in 1972 at 7th and Vermont Streets with voters approving a bond issue in 2010 to expand and update the building. During construction, the library moved to 7th and New Hampshire in the former Borders bookstore. The new library opened in July 2014.


title: Lawrence, Kansas

text: The Lawrence Public Library was one of seven libraries in the United States that won the AIA/ALA Library Building Award in 2016.


title: Lawrence, Kansas

text: One of the first businesses established in Lawrence was a newspaper, the "Herald of Freedom", which began in October 1854 and ceased publication in 1859. In August 1885, the Lawrence "Daily Journal" began and the Lawrence "Daily World" began in June 1895. These papers would merge in 1911 to become the Lawrence Journal-World although the masthead lists the founding as 1858, probably in reference to the "Herald of Freedom". Other newspapers include The "University Daily Kansan", a student newspaper from the University of Kansas, The "Open Kansan", an independent student newspaper from the University of Kansas, "The Lawrence Times", an online newspaper founded by former "Lawrence Journal World" employees, and "Change of Heart", a street newspaper sold by homeless vendors.


title: Lawrence, Kansas

text: Radio stations in Lawrence include KLWN an AM station that began in 1951. FM stations are KU's student station, KJHK, KANU, a NPR member station, K241AR, a Christian station that broadcasts Air 1, KCIU-LP, a religious station and KKSW, formerly KLZR, a Top 40 station. KMXN, a country station, also broadcasts from Lawrence but is licensed to Osage City. Listeners can also receive stations from Kansas City and Topeka.


title: Lawrence, Kansas

text: Lawrence is in the Kansas City television market, but viewers can also receive stations from the Topeka market as well. Television stations licensed and/or broadcasting from Lawrence are KUJH-LP, a KU student station, and KMCI which broadcasts from Kansas City, Missouri.


title: Lawrence, Kansas

text: From 1947 until 1981, Lawrence was the location of the Centron Corporation, one of the major industrial and educational film production companies in the United States at the time. The studio was founded by two University of Kansas graduates and employed university students and faculty members as advisers and actors. Also, many talented local and area filmmakers were given their first chances to make movies with Centron, and some stayed for decades. Others went on to successful careers in Hollywood. One of these local residents, Herk Harvey, was employed by Centron as a director for 35 years and in the middle of his tenure there he made a full-length theatrical film, "Carnival of Souls", a horror cult film shot mostly in Lawrence and released in 1962. The Centron Corporation soundstage and residing building is now called Oldfather Studios and houses the University of Kansas film program.


title: Lawrence, Kansas

text: Lawrence is the home of a daily newspaper, the "Lawrence Journal-World". The student newspaper of the University of Kansas is "The University Daily Kansan," which stopped publishing regular print editions in 2020 due to the COVID-19 Pandemic and removed the paper's distribution boxes.


title: Lawrence, Kansas

text: Interstate 70, as the Kansas Turnpike, runs east–west along the northern edge of the city, interchanging with U.S. Route 59 which runs north–south along North 2nd Street, 6th Street and Iowa Street. Another east–west route, U.S. Route 40, runs through northern Lawrence along 6th Street roughly 2 miles south of I-70. U.S. 40 runs concurrently east–west with U.S. 59 for approximately 1 mile between Iowa Street and Massachusetts Street. The two routes turn north before crossing I-70. One half-mile north of I-70, U.S. 40 splits from U.S. 59 and turns east, running concurrently with U.S. 24, exiting the city.


title: Lawrence, Kansas

text: K-10, an east–west state highway, enters the city from the east along 23rd Street, then turns south, running concurrently with U.S. 59 for 1.5 miles before splitting off and continuing west and finally north around western Lawrence as a bypass, terminating at an interchange with I-70 northwest of the city. The K-10 South Lawrence Trafficway is a project with the goal to connect K-10 and the Kansas Turnpike. To transfer between K-10 and the Kansas Turnpike, drivers must use Lawrence city streets. The K-10 South Lawrence Trafficway, already partially built, was proposed as a solution to traffic, air quality, and safety concerns. However, the project has received criticism and been the subject of many protests for more than a decade because of opposition to the trafficway being built through the Haskell-Baker Wetlands. More recently, it appears completion of the project is underway. In June 2011, the Kansas Department of Transportation announced it would provide $192 million to complete the trafficway and in July 2012, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court's ruling that all necessary permits were properly obtained and construction could commence. As for the wetlands, about 56 acres were taken for the construction of the South Lawrence Trafficway; because of this some 380 acres of man-made wetlands were developed next to the site.


title: Lawrence, Kansas

text: Two bus systems operate in the city. Lawrence Transit, known locally as "The T", is a public bus system operated by the city, and KU on Wheels is operated by the University of Kansas. Together, the two systems operate 18 bus routes in the city. Both systems are free to KU students, faculty, and staff. Greyhound Lines provides intercity bus service with a stop in Lawrence. In addition, the Johnson County, Kansas bus system provides inter-city transport between Lawrence and Overland Park college campuses in a route known as the K-10 Connector.


title: Lawrence, Kansas

text: Lawrence Regional Airport is northeast of the city, immediately north of U.S. 40. Publicly owned, it has two runways and is used for general aviation. The nearest airport with commercial airline service is Kansas City International Airport which is approximately 50 miles northeast of downtown Lawrence. Arrival Shuttle provides service from Lawrence to Kansas City International Airport.


title: Lawrence, Kansas

text: Two Class I railroads, BNSF Railway and Union Pacific Railroad (UP), have lines which pass through Lawrence. The BNSF line enters the city from the east and exits to the north, roughly following the course of the Kansas River. The UP line does the same on the north side of the river, running through the city's northeast corner. Using the BNSF trackage, Amtrak provides passenger rail service on its "Southwest Chief" line between Chicago and Los Angeles. Amtrak's Lawrence station is a few blocks east of downtown.


title: Lawrence, Kansas

text: According to the 2017 American Community Survey, 76.6% of working city of Lawrence residents commuted by driving alone, 8.9% carpooled, 2.6% used public transportation, and 6.0% walked. About 2.0% used all other forms of transportation, including taxicab, motorcycle, and bicycle. About 3.8% of working city of Lawrence residents worked at home. In 2017, 2.5% of city of Lawrence households were without a car. 77.3% of city of Lawrence residents also work in Lawrence.


title: Lawrence, Kansas

text: Lawrence ranked 62nd in the United States for the highest percentage of commuters by bicycle in 2011 at 1.73%.


title: Lawrence, Kansas

text: Lawrence has one hospital, the non-profit community-owned Lawrence Memorial Hospital. The hospital has been awarded several awards and recognitions for care and quality including The Hospital Value Index Best in Value Award, and it is ranked nationally in the top five percent for heart attack care by the American College of Cardiology.


title: Lawrence, Kansas

text: The most predominant electric provider is Evergy, and the most predominant gas provider is Black Hills Energy. Midco and DirecTV are the major television providers. Internet providers include AT&T, Midco, Wicked Broadband, CenturyLink, Exede and Wildblue Internet Service, HughesNet, Allconnect, and ViaSat Satellite. There are numerous telephone service providers in Lawrence, including Midco, AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, and others.


title: Lawrence, Kansas

text: Snow removal services are provided by the Lawrence Street Maintenance Division, who is also responsible for maintaining the city's streets, curbs, alleys, and gutters, the Kansas River and Mud Creek levee, some of the infrastructure of the Lawrence Regional Airport, and street sweeping.


title: Lawrence, Kansas

text: The city served as the setting for a number of science fiction writer James Gunn's novels, including "The Immortals" (1964), which was the basis for the ABC television movie and TV series "The Immortal" (1969–1971).


title: Lawrence, Kansas

text: Lawrence is a setting in the 1983 television movie "The Day After", and parts of the movie were filmed in the city.


title: Lawrence, Kansas

text: Sam and Dean Winchester, the protagonists of the "Supernatural" TV series, are from Lawrence, and the city has been referenced numerous times throughout the show's history. Eric Kripke, the creator of "Supernatural", decided to have the two brothers be from Lawrence because of its closeness to Stull Cemetery, a location famous for its urban legends. Lawrence was destroyed in the 2006 TV Series "Jericho".


title: Lawrence, Kansas

text: American folk singer Josh Ritter's song "Lawrence KS" is on the 2002 album "Golden Age of Radio." Cross Canadian Ragweed's 2007 album "Mission California" features the song "Lawrence", which was inspired by a homeless family the band encountered near Christmas while visiting the town.


title: Lawrence, Kansas

text: Lawrence's Meadowbrook Apartments residential complex is the default starting point for the map program Google Earth. This location was set by Brian McClendon, a 1986 graduate of the University of Kansas and director of engineering for Google Earth, who lived in the complex as a child.


title: Manhattan (1979 film)

text: Manhattan is a 1979 American romantic comedy-drama film directed by Woody Allen and produced by Charles H. Joffe from a screenplay written by Allen and Marshall Brickman. Allen co-stars as a twice-divorced 42-year-old comedy writer who dates a 17-year-old girl (Mariel Hemingway) but falls in love with his best friend's (Michael Murphy) mistress (Diane Keaton). Meryl Streep and Anne Byrne also star.


title: Manhattan (1979 film)

text: "Manhattan" was Allen's first movie filmed in black-and-white, and was shot in 2.35:1 widescreen. It features music by George Gershwin, including "Rhapsody in Blue", which inspired the film. Allen described the film as a combination of "Annie Hall" and "Interiors".


title: Manhattan (1979 film)

text: The film received critical acclaim and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Hemingway and Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen for Allen and Brickman. Its North American box-office receipts of $39.9 million made it Allen's second biggest box-office hit (adjusted for inflation). It ranks 46th on AFI's 100 Years...100 Laughs list and number 63 on Bravo's "100 Funniest Movies". In 2001, the United States Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.


title: Manhattan (1979 film)

text: The film opens with a montage of images of Manhattan and other parts of New York City accompanied by George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue", with Isaac Davis narrating drafts of an introduction to a book about a man who loves the city. Isaac is a twice-divorced, 42-year-old television comedy writer who quits his boring job. He is dating Tracy, a 17-year-old girl attending the Dalton School. His best friend, college professor Yale Pollack, married to Emily, is having an affair with Mary Wilkie. Mary's ex-husband and former teacher, Jeremiah, also appears, and Isaac's ex-wife Jill is writing a confessional book about their marriage. Jill, who before their marriage told Isaac that she was bisexual, has since come out and lives with her lesbian partner, Connie.


title: Manhattan (1979 film)

text: When Isaac meets Mary, her cultural snobbery offends him. Isaac runs into her again at an Equal Rights Amendment fund-raising event at the Museum of Modern Art hosted by Bella Abzug and escorts her home. They chat until sunrise in a sequence that culminates in a shot of the Queensboro Bridge. In spite of a growing attraction to Mary, Isaac continues his relationship with Tracy but emphasizes that theirs cannot be a serious relationship and encourages her to go to London to study acting.


title: Manhattan (1979 film)

text: After Yale breaks up with Mary, he suggests that Isaac ask her out. Isaac does, always having felt that Tracy was too young for him. Isaac breaks up with Tracy, much to her distress, and before long, Mary has virtually moved into his apartment. Emily is curious about Isaac's new girlfriend. The two couples enjoy a day out and upon walking down a street Isaac spots Jill's new book, "Marriage, Divorce, and Selfhood". Emily proceeds to read parts of the book aloud, including passages about a ménage à trois Isaac had with Jill and another woman, and an incident where Isaac attempted to run Connie over, much to Mary and Yale's amusement. Publicly humiliated, Isaac confronts Jill, who responds nonchalantly and mentions a film rights deal she has acquired. Upon returning home, Isaac learns from Mary that she is returning to Yale and wants to break up. A furious Isaac confronts Yale at the college where he teaches, and Yale argues that he found Mary first. Isaac discusses Yale's extramarital affairs with Emily and learns that Yale told her Isaac introduced Mary to him.


title: Manhattan (1979 film)

text: In the dénouement, Isaac lies on his sofa, musing into a tape recorder about the things that make "life worth living". When he finds himself saying "Tracy's face", he sets down the microphone. Unable to reach her by phone, he sets out for Tracy's on foot. He arrives at her family's apartment building just as she is leaving for London. He asks her not to go and says he does not want "that thing about [her] that [he] like[s]" to change. She replies that the plans have already been made and reassures him that "not everybody gets corrupted" before saying "you have to have a little faith in people". He gives her a slight smile, with a final look to the camera then segueing into final shots of the skyline with some bars of "Rhapsody in Blue" playing again. An instrumental version of "Embraceable You" plays over the credits.


title: Manhattan (1979 film)

text: According to Allen, the idea for "Manhattan" originated from his love of Gershwin's music. He was listening to one of the composer's albums of overtures and thought, "this would be a beautiful thing to make ... a movie in black and white ... a romantic movie". Allen has said that "Manhattan" was "like a mixture of what I was trying to do with "Annie Hall" and "Interiors"" and that it deals with the problem of people trying to live a decent existence in an essentially junk-obsessed contemporary culture without selling out, admitting that he himself could conceive of giving away all of his "possessions to charity and living in much more modest circumstances," adding that he has "rationalized [his] way out of it so far, but [he] could conceive of doing it."


title: Manhattan (1979 film)

text: Babi Christina Engelhardt has said that the film was partially based on her relationship with Allen, which began soon after they met at a restaurant in New York in 1976. But actress Stacey Nelkin believes the character of Tracy is based on her. Engelhardt later said she presumes that Tracy is a composite of Nelkin, herself and "any number" of other young girls Allen was sleeping with at the time.


title: Manhattan (1979 film)

text: Allen talked to cinematographer Gordon Willis about how fun it would be to shoot the film in black and white, Panavision aspect ratio (2.35:1) because it would give "a great look at New York City, which is sort of one of the characters in the film". Allen decided to shoot his film in black and white because that was how he remembered it from when he was small. "Maybe it's a reminiscence from old photographs, films, books and all that. But that's how I remember New York." The film was shot on location with the exception of some of the scenes in the planetarium, which were filmed on a set.


title: Manhattan (1979 film)

text: The famous bridge shot was done at five in the morning. The production had to bring their own bench as there were no park benches at the location. The bridge had two sets of necklace lights on a timer controlled by the city. When the sun came up, the bridge lights went off. Willis made arrangements with the city to leave the lights on and that he would let them know when they got the shot. Afterward, they could be turned off. As they started to shoot the scene, one string of bridge lights went out, and Allen was forced to use that take.


title: Manhattan (1979 film)

text: After finishing the film, Allen was very unhappy with it and asked United Artists not to release it. He offered to make a film for no fee instead. He later said, "I just thought to myself, 'At this point in my life, if this is the best I can do, they shouldn't give me money to make movies.'"


title: Manhattan (1979 film)

text: All titles of the soundtrack were compositions by George Gershwin. They were performed by the New York Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta and the Buffalo Philharmonic under Michael Tilson Thomas.


title: Manhattan (1979 film)

text: "Manhattan" premiered at the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York City on April 18, 1979. It opened in 27 theaters in New York City, Los Angeles and Toronto on April 25, then expanded to an additional 256 theaters nationwide on May 4, before adding a further 117 screens a week later. The film was shown out of competition at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival in May.


title: Manhattan (1979 film)

text: The film grossed $485,734 ($16,749 per screen) in its opening weekend and after expanding nationwide, it had grossed $3.5 million after 13 days. It grossed $39.9 million in its entire run in the United States and Canada, making the film the 17th highest-grossing picture of the year. Adjusted for ticket price inflation (as of 2017), "Manhattan" grossed $141,484,800, making it Allen's second biggest box-office hit, following 1977's "Annie Hall".


title: Manhattan (1979 film)

text: The film received largely positive reviews and holds a rating of 94% "Certified Fresh" on Rotten Tomatoes based on reviews from 68 critics, with an average rating of 8.5/10. The website's consensus reads, "One of Woody Allen's early classics, "Manhattan" combines modern, bittersweet humor and timeless romanticism with unerring grace." Gary Arnold, in "The Washington Post", wrote: ""Manhattan" has comic integrity in part because Allen is now making jokes at the expense of his own parochialism. There's no opportunity to heap condescending abuse on the phonies and sell-outs decorating the Hollywood landscape. The result appears to be a more authentic and magnanimous comic perception of human vanity and foolhardiness." In his review for "Newsweek" magazine, Jack Kroll wrote: "Allen's growth in every department is lovely to behold. He gets excellent performances from his cast. The increasing visual beauty of his films is part of their grace and sweetness, their balance between Allen's yearning romanticism and his tough eye for the fatuous and sentimental – a balance also expressed in his best screen play ["sic"] yet." In his review for the "Chicago Sun-Times", Roger Ebert, who gave the film three-and-a-half stars out of four, wrote, "Diane Keaton gives us a fresh and nicely edged New York intellectual. And Mariel Hemingway deserves some kind of special award for what's in some ways the most difficult role in the film." Ebert included the film in his list of "The Great Movies". Gene Siskel of the "Chicago Tribune" awarded a full four out of four stars, calling it "a remarkable motion picture. 'Manhattan' may turn out to be the year's best comedy "and" drama." Vincent Canby of "The New York Times" called the film "extraordinarily fine and funny" with "superb" performances from Keaton and Hemingway. Charles Champlin of the "Los Angeles Times" called it "harder, harsher, crueler, deeper-going, more assertive but in the end no less life-affirming than 'Annie Hall,'" and declared "Manhattan" "even better" than that film. Stanley Kauffmann of "The New Republic" wrote, ""Manhattan" is a faulty film, but it's moderately amusing".


title: Manhattan (1979 film)

text: Alexander Walker of the "London Evening Standard" wrote: "So precisely nuanced is the speech, so subtle the behaviour of a group of friends, lovers, mistresses and cuckolds who keep splitting up and pairing off like unstable molecules". In 2007 J. Hoberman wrote in "The Village Voice": "The New York City that Woody so tediously defended in "Annie Hall" was in crisis. And so he imagined an improved version. More than that, he cast this shining city in the form of those movies that he might have seen as a child in Coney Island—freeing the visions that he sensed to be locked up in the silver screen."


title: Manhattan (1979 film)

text: New York Film Critics Circle named Allen best director for "Manhattan". The National Society of Film Critics also named Allen best director along with Robert Benton, who directed "Kramer vs. Kramer". The film was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actress (Mariel Hemingway) and Best Original Screenplay (Allen and Marshall Brickman). It also won the BAFTA Award for Best Film and the César Award for Best Foreign Film.


title: Manhattan (1979 film)

text: In "Empire" magazine's 2008 poll of the 500 greatest movies ever made, "Manhattan" was ranked number 76. "The New York Times" placed the film on its "Best 1000 Movies Ever" list. The film was number 63 on Bravo's "100 Funniest Movies". In 2001, the United States Library of Congress deemed it "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry. It is also ranked No. 4 on Rotten Tomatoes' 25 Best Romantic Comedies.


title: Manhattan (1979 film)

text: Allen wanted to preserve Willis's compositions and insisted that the aspect ratio be preserved when the film was released on video (an unusual request in a time when widescreen films were normally panned and scanned for TV and video release). As a result, all copies of the film on video (and most television broadcasts) were letterboxed, originally with a gray border.


title: Manhattan (1979 film)

text: "Manhattan" was first released on Blu-ray on January 24, 2012, alongside Allen's 1977 film "Annie Hall". Both releases included the films' original theatrical trailer.


title: Manhattan (1979 film)

text: "Manhattan"s screenplay was performed in front of a live audience at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on November 15, 2012, as part of Jason Reitman's Live Read series. Actors read the script, narrowed to six speaking parts, and still photographs from the movie were projected behind them. The cast included Stephen Merchant as Isaac Davis, Olivia Munn as Mary Wilkie, Shailene Woodley as Tracy, Michael Murphy as Yale Pollack, Mae Whitman as Emily Pollack, Erika Christensen as Jill Davis and Jason Mantzoukas as Dennis. In keeping with the project's focus on impermanence and spontaneity, there were no rehearsals, shows were announced only days prior, and the names of some cast members were withheld entirely; performances were not recorded.


title: Manhattan (1979 film)

text: "Manhattan" inspired the song "Remember Manhattan" written by Richard Marx and Fee Waybill from Marx's debut album.


title: Manhattan (1979 film)

text: "Manhattan"'s portrayal of a middle-aged man dating a teenager, which drew little criticism at the time of its release, attracted more scrutiny in the late 2010s as Allen's reputation came into question in the wake of renewed allegations by his daughter Dylan Farrow.


title: James Dreyfus

text: James Dreyfus (born 9 October 1968) is an English actor most notable for roles on television sitcoms "The Thin Blue Line" as Constable Kevin Goody, and "Gimme Gimme Gimme" as Tom Farrell. Dreyfus is most recently known for a role as Reverend Roger in "Mount Pleasant".


title: James Dreyfus

text: Born in London, Dreyfus was educated at Harrow School. He then trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. His parents divorced when he was very young.


title: James Dreyfus

text: In 1998, Dreyfus won the Best Supporting Performance in a Musical Olivier Award for his work in "The Lady in the Dark" at the National Theatre. In the same year, Dreyfus was nominated for the Ian Charleson Award for a performance as Cassius in Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" at the Birmingham Rep.


title: James Dreyfus

text: Dreyfus's first television break came with the BBC comedy series "Absolutely Fabulous". followed by roles as Constable Kevin Goody in Ben Elton's sitcom "The Thin Blue Line" and Tom Farrell, the gay flatmate of Linda (Kathy Burke) in "Gimme Gimme Gimme". Dreyfus played opposite Bette Midler in the short-lived American sitcom "Bette".


title: James Dreyfus

text: Known for portraying "camp, endearing characters," Dreyfus (in a "Sheengate Publishing" interview) compared the character Frank Spencer from "Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em", whom he described as a campy but married heterosexual, to Dreyfus's character Kevin Goody from "The Thin Blue Line". Regarding his character Tom Farrell from "Gimme Gimme Gimme", Dreyfus hypothesized that, even if the character were heterosexual, the actor would still portray Tom as camp and flamboyant. Furthermore, Dreyfus said that he felt that he became typecast due to his portrayals of "flamboyant" characters.


title: James Dreyfus

text: He played Thermoman in the BBC One comedy "My Hero", a role he took over in the sixth series from Ardal O'Hanlon. Although the same character, he used the name George Monday, as opposed to Ardal O'Hanlon's character's name, George Sunday. After disappointing ratings, the show was cancelled.


title: James Dreyfus

text: In 2017, he voiced an incarnation of The Master from "Doctor Who" in the Big Finish Productions release , going on to appear as the character in 2019's 'The Home Guard', 2020's 'The Psychic Circus' and 2022's 'Blood of the Time Lords'. In an interview with comedy writer and gender-critical activist Graham Linehan, Dreyfus claimed he was dismissed from the role following comments on Twitter made in support of author JK Rowling.


title: Cost–benefit analysis

text: Cost–benefit analysis (CBA), sometimes also called benefit–cost analysis, is a systematic approach to estimating the strengths and weaknesses of alternatives. It is used to determine options which provide the best approach to achieving benefits while preserving savings in, for example, transactions, activities, and functional business requirements. A CBA may be used to compare completed or potential courses of action, and to estimate or evaluate the value against the cost of a decision, project, or policy. It is commonly used to evaluate business or policy decisions (particularly public policy), commercial transactions, and project investments. For example, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission must conduct cost-benefit analyses before instituting regulations or deregulations.


title: Cost–benefit analysis

text: CBA is related to cost-effectiveness analysis. Benefits and costs in CBA are expressed in monetary terms and are adjusted for the time value of money; all flows of benefits and costs over time are expressed on a common basis in terms of their net present value, regardless of whether they are incurred at different times. Other related techniques include cost–utility analysis, risk–benefit analysis, economic impact analysis, fiscal impact analysis, and social return on investment (SROI) analysis.


title: Cost–benefit analysis

text: Cost–benefit analysis is often used by organizations to appraise the desirability of a given policy. It is an analysis of the expected balance of benefits and costs, including an account of any alternatives and the "status quo". CBA helps predict whether the benefits of a policy outweigh its costs (and by how much), relative to other alternatives. This allows the ranking of alternative policies in terms of a cost–benefit ratio. Generally, accurate cost–benefit analysis identifies choices which increase welfare from a utilitarian perspective. Assuming an accurate CBA, changing the "status quo" by implementing the alternative with the lowest cost–benefit ratio can improve Pareto efficiency. Although CBA can offer an informed estimate of the best alternative, a perfect appraisal of all present and future costs and benefits is difficult; perfection, in economic efficiency and social welfare, is not guaranteed.


title: Cost–benefit analysis

text: The value of a cost–benefit analysis depends on the accuracy of the individual cost and benefit estimates. Comparative studies indicate that such estimates are often flawed, preventing improvements in Pareto and Kaldor–Hicks efficiency. Interest groups may attempt to include (or exclude) significant costs in an analysis to influence its outcome.


title: Cost–benefit analysis

text: The concept of CBA dates back to an 1848 article by Jules Dupuit, and was formalized in subsequent works by Alfred Marshall. Jules Dupuit pioneered this approach by first calculating "the social profitability of a project like the construction of a road or bridge" In an attempt to answer this, Dupuit began to look at the utility users would gain from the project. He determined that the best method of measuring utility is by learning one's willingness to pay for something. By taking the sum of each user's willingness to pay, Dupuit illustrated that the social benefit of the thing (bridge or road or canal) could be measured. Some users may be willing to pay nearly nothing, others much more, but the sum of these would shed light on the benefit of it. It should be reiterated that Dupuit was not suggesting that the government perfectly price-discriminate and charge each user exactly what they would pay. Rather, their willingness to pay provided a theoretical foundation on the societal worth or benefit of a project. The cost of the project proved much simpler to calculate. Simply taking the sum of the materials and labor, in addition to the maintenance afterward, would give one the cost. Now, the costs and benefits of the project could be accurately analyzed, and an informed decision could be made.


title: Cost–benefit analysis

text: The Corps of Engineers initiated the use of CBA in the US, after the Federal Navigation Act of 1936 mandated cost–benefit analysis for proposed federal-waterway infrastructure. The Flood Control Act of 1939 was instrumental in establishing CBA as federal policy, requiring that "the benefits to whomever they accrue [be] in excess of the estimated costs."


title: Cost–benefit analysis

text: CBA's application to broader public policy began with the work of Otto Eckstein, who laid out a welfare economics foundation for CBA and its application to water-resource development in 1958. It was applied in the US to water quality, recreational travel, and land conservation during the 1960s, and the concept of option value was developed to represent the non-tangible value of resources such as national parks.


title: Cost–benefit analysis

text: CBA was expanded to address the intangible and tangible benefits of public policies relating to mental illness, substance abuse, college education, and chemical waste. In the US, the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 required CBA for regulatory programs; since then, other governments have enacted similar rules. Government guidebooks for the application of CBA to public policies include the Canadian guide for regulatory analysis, the Australian guide for regulation and finance, and the US guides for health-care and emergency-management programs.


title: Cost–benefit analysis

text: CBA for transport investment began in the UK with the M1 motorway project and was later used for many projects, including the London Underground's Victoria line. The New Approach to Appraisal (NATA) was later introduced by the Department for Transport, Environment and the Regions. This presented balanced cost–benefit results and detailed environmental impact assessments. NATA was first applied to national road schemes in the 1998 Roads Review, and was subsequently rolled out to all transport modes. Maintained and developed by the Department for Transport, it was a cornerstone of UK transport appraisal in 2011.


title: Cost–benefit analysis

text: The European Union's Developing Harmonised European Approaches for Transport Costing and Project Assessment (HEATCO) project, part of the EU's Sixth Framework Programme, reviewed transport appraisal guidance of EU member states and found significant national differences. HEATCO aimed to develop guidelines to harmonise transport appraisal practice across the EU.


title: Cost–benefit analysis

text: Transport Canada promoted CBA for major transport investments with the 1994 publication of its guidebook. US federal and state transport departments commonly apply CBA with a variety of software tools, including HERS, BCA.Net, StatBenCost, Cal-BC, and TREDIS. Guides are available from the Federal Highway Administration, Federal Aviation Administration, Minnesota Department of Transportation, California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), and the Transportation Research Board's Transportation Economics Committee.


title: Cost–benefit analysis

text: In health economics, CBA may be an inadequate measure because willingness-to-pay methods of determining the value of human life can be influenced by income level. Variants, such as cost–utility analysis, QALY and DALY to analyze the effects of health policies, may be more suitable.


title: Cost–benefit analysis

text: For some environmental effects, cost–benefit analysis can be replaced by cost-effectiveness analysis. This is especially true when one type of physical outcome is sought, such as a reduction in energy use by an increase in energy efficiency. Using cost-effectiveness analysis is less laborious and time-consuming, since it does not involve the monetization of outcomes (which can be difficult in some cases).


title: Cost–benefit analysis

text: It has been argued that if modern cost–benefit analyses had been applied to decisions such as whether to mandate the removal of lead from gasoline, block the construction of two proposed dams just above and below the Grand Canyon on the Colorado River, and regulate workers' exposure to vinyl chloride, the measures would not have been implemented (although all are considered highly successful). The US Clean Air Act has been cited in retrospective studies as a case in which benefits exceeded costs, but knowledge of the benefits (attributable largely to the benefits of reducing particulate pollution) was not available until many years later.


title: Cost–benefit analysis

text: CBA attempts to measure the positive or negative consequences of a project. A similar approach is used in the environmental analysis of total economic value. Both costs and benefits can be diverse. Costs tend to be most thoroughly represented in cost–benefit analyses due to relatively-abundant market data. The net benefits of a project may incorporate cost savings, public willingness to pay (implying that the public has no legal right to the benefits of the policy), or willingness to accept compensation (implying that the public has a right to the benefits of the policy) for the policy's welfare change. The guiding principle of evaluating benefits is to list all parties affected by an intervention and add the positive or negative value (usually monetary) that they ascribe to its effect on their welfare.


title: Cost–benefit analysis

text: The actual compensation an individual would require to have their welfare unchanged by a policy is inexact at best. Surveys (stated preferences) or market behavior (revealed preferences) are often used to estimate compensation associated with a policy. Stated preferences are a direct way of assessing willingness to pay for an environmental feature, for example. Survey respondents often misreport their true preferences, however, and market behavior does not provide information about important non-market welfare impacts. Revealed preference is an indirect approach to individual willingness to pay. People make market choices of items with different environmental characteristics, for example, revealing the value placed on environmental factors.


title: Cost–benefit analysis

text: The value of human life is controversial when assessing road-safety measures or life-saving medicines. Controversy can sometimes be avoided by using the related technique of cost–utility analysis, in which benefits are expressed in non-monetary units such as quality-adjusted life years. Road safety can be measured in cost per life saved, without assigning a financial value to the life. However, non-monetary metrics have limited usefulness for evaluating policies with substantially different outcomes. Other benefits may also accrue from a policy, and metrics such as cost per life saved may lead to a substantially different ranking of alternatives than CBA.


title: Cost–benefit analysis

text: Another metric is valuing the environment, which in the 21st century is typically assessed by valuing ecosystem services to humans (such as air and water quality and pollution). Monetary values may also be assigned to other intangible effects such as business reputation, market penetration, or long-term enterprise strategy alignment.


title: Cost–benefit analysis

text: CBA generally attempts to put all relevant costs and benefits on a common temporal footing, using time value of money calculations. This is often done by converting the future expected streams of costs (formula_1) and benefits (formula_2) into a present value amount with a discount rate (formula_3) and the net present value defined as:formula_4The selection of a discount rate for this calculation is subjective. A smaller rate values the current generation and future generations equally. Larger rates (a market rate of return, for example) reflects human present bias or hyperbolic discounting: valuing money which they will receive in the near future more than money they will receive in the distant future. Empirical studies suggest that people discount future benefits in a way similar to these calculations. The choice makes a large difference in assessing interventions with long-term effects. An example is the equity premium puzzle, which suggests that long-term returns on equities may be higher than they should be after controlling for risk and uncertainty. If so, market rates of return should not be used to determine the discount rate because they would undervalue the distant future.


title: Cost–benefit analysis

text: For publicly traded companies, it is possible to find a project's discount rate by using an equilibrium asset pricing model to find the required return on equity for the company and then assuming that the risk profile of a given project is similar to that the company faces. Commonly used models include the capital asset pricing model (CAPM):formula_5and the Fama-French model:formula_6where the formula_7 terms correspond to the factor loadings. A generalization of these methods can be found in arbitrage pricing theory, which allows for an arbitrary number of risk premiums in the calculation of the required return.


title: Cost–benefit analysis

text: Risk associated with project outcomes is usually handled with probability theory. Although it can be factored into the discount rate (to have uncertainty increasing over time), it is usually considered separately. Particular consideration is often given to agent risk aversion: preferring a situation with less uncertainty to one with greater uncertainty, even if the latter has a higher expected return.


title: Cost–benefit analysis

text: Uncertainty in CBA parameters can be evaluated with a sensitivity analysis, which indicates how results respond to parameter changes. A more formal risk analysis may also be undertaken with the Monte Carlo method. However, even a low parameter of uncertainty does not guarantee the success of a project.


title: Cost–benefit analysis

text: Suppose that we have sources of uncertainty in a CBA that are best treated with the Monte Carlo method, and the distributions describing uncertainty are all continuous. How do we go about choosing the appropriate distribution to represent the sources of uncertainty? One popular method is to make use of the principle of maximum entropy, which states that the distribution with the best representation of current knowledge is the one with the largest entropy - defined for continuous distributions as:formula_8where formula_9 is the support set of a probability density function formula_10. Suppose that we impose a series of constraints that must be satisfied:


title: Cost–benefit analysis

text: where the last equality is a series of moment conditions. Maximizing the entropy with these constraints leads to the functional:formula_15where the formula_16 are Lagrange multipliers. Maximizing this functional leads to the form of a maximum entropy distribution:formula_17There is a direct correspondence between the form of a maximum entropy distribution and the exponential family. Examples of commonly used continuous maximum entropy distributions in simulations include:


title: Cost–benefit analysis

text: The increased use of CBA in the US regulatory process is often associated with President Ronald Reagan's administration. Although CBA in US policy-making dates back several decades, Reagan's Executive Order 12291 mandated its use in the regulatory process. After campaigning on a deregulation platform, he issued the 1981 EO authorizing the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) to review agency regulations and requiring federal agencies to produce regulatory impact analyses when the estimated annual impact exceeded $100 million. During the 1980s, academic and institutional critiques of CBA emerged. The three main criticisms were:


title: Cost–benefit analysis

text: These criticisms continued under the Clinton administration during the 1990s. Clinton furthered the anti-regulatory environment with his Executive Order 12866. The order changed some of Reagan's language, requiring benefits to justify (rather than exceeding) costs and adding "reduction of discrimination or bias" as a benefit to be analyzed. Criticisms of CBA (including uncertainty valuations, discounting future values, and the calculation of risk) were used to argue that it should play no part in the regulatory process. The use of CBA in the regulatory process continued under the Obama administration, along with the debate about its practical and objective value. Some analysts oppose the use of CBA in policy-making, and those in favor of it support improvements in analysis and calculations.


title: Cost–benefit analysis

text: There are a range of criticisms that have been leveled against CBA over time. These include concerns about measuring the distribution of costs and benefits, discounting the costs and benefits to future generations, and accounting for the diminishing marginal utility of income.


title: Cost–benefit analysis

text: CBA has been criticized in some disciplines as it relies on the Kaldor-Hicks criterion which does not take into account distributional issues. This means, that positive net-benefits are decisive, independent of who benefits and who loses when a certain policy or project is put into place. Phaneuf and Requate phrased it as follows "CBA today relies on the Kaldor-Hicks criteria to make statements about efficiency without addressing issues of income distribution. This has allowed economists to stay silent on issues of equity, while focusing on the more familiar task of measuring costs and benefits". The challenge raised is that it is possible for the benefits of successive policies to consistently accrue to the same group of individuals, and CBA is ambivalent between providing benefits to those that have received them in the past and those that have been consistently excluded. Policy solutions, such as progressive taxation can address some of these concerns.


title: Cost–benefit analysis

text: Others have critiqued the practice of discounting future costs and benefits for a variety of reasons, including the potential undervaluing of the temporally distant cost of climate change and other environmental damage, and the concern that such a practice effectively ignores the preferences of future generations. Some scholars argue that the use of discounting makes CBA biased against future generations, and understates the potential harmful impacts of climate change. The growing relevance of climate change has led to a re-examination of the practice of discounting in CBA.


title: Cost–benefit analysis

text: The main criticism stems from the diminishing marginal utility of income. According to this critique, without using weights in the CBA, it is not the case that everyone “matters” the same but rather that people with greater ability to pay receive a higher weight. One reason for this is that for high income people, one monetary unit is worth less relative to low income people, so they are more willing to give up one unit in order to make a change that is favourable for them. This means that there is no symmetry in agents, i.e. some people benefit more from the same absolute monetary benefit. Any welfare change, no matter positive or negative, affects people with a lower income stronger than people with a higher income, even if the exact monetary impacts are identical. This is more than just a challenge to the distribution of benefits in CBA, it is a critique of the ability of CBA to accurately measure benefits as, according to this critique, using unweighted absolute willingness to pay overstates the costs and benefits to the wealthy, and understates those costs and benefits to the poor. Sometimes this is framed in terms of an argument about democracy, that each person's preferences should be given the same weight in an analysis (one person one vote), while under a standard CBA model the preferences of the wealthy are given greater weight.


title: Cost–benefit analysis

text: Taken together, according to this objection, not using weights is a decision in itself – richer people receive de facto a bigger weight. To compensate for this difference in valuation, it is possible to use different methods. One is to use weights, and there are a number of different approaches for calculating these weights. Often, a Bergson-Samuelson social welfare function is used and weights are calculated according to the willingness-to-pay of people. Another method is to use percentage willingness to pay, where willingness to pay is measured as a percentage of total income or wealth to control for income. These methods would also help to address distributional concerns raised by the Kaldor-Hick criterion.


title: Utility

text: As a topic of economics, utility is used to model worth or value. Its usage has evolved significantly over time. The term was introduced initially as a measure of pleasure or happiness as part of the theory of utilitarianism by moral philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. The term has been adapted and reapplied within neoclassical economics, which dominates modern economic theory, as a utility function that represents a single consumer's preference ordering over a choice set but is not comparable across consumers. This concept of utility is personal and based on choice rather than on pleasure received, and so is specified more rigorously than the original concept but makes it less useful (and controversial) for ethical decisions.


title: Utility

text: Consider a set of alternatives among which a person can make a preference ordering. The utility obtained from these alternatives is an unknown function of the utilities obtained from each alternative, not the sum of each alternative. A utility function is able to represent that ordering if it is possible to assign a real number to each alternative in such a manner that "alternative a" is assigned a number greater than "alternative b" if and only if the individual prefers "alternative a" to "alternative b". In this situation someone who selects the most preferred alternative is necessarily also selecting the alternative that maximizes the associated utility function.


title: Utility

text: Suppose James has utility function formula_1 such that x is the number of apples and y is the number of chocolates. Alternative A has formula_2 apples and formula_3 chocolates; alternative B has formula_4 apples and formula_5 chocolates. Putting the values x, y into the utility function yields formula_6 for alternative A and formula_7 for B, so James prefers alternative B.


title: Utility

text: In general economic terms, a utility function measures preferences concerning a set of goods and services. Utility is often correlated with concepts such as happiness, satisfaction, and welfare which are difficult to measure. Thus, economists utilize consumption baskets of preferences in order to measure these abstract, nonquantifiable ideas.


title: Utility

text: Gérard Debreu precisely defined the conditions required for a preference ordering to be representable by a utility function. For a finite set of alternatives these require only that the preference ordering is complete (so the individual is able to determine which of any two alternatives is preferred or that they are equal), and that the preference order is transitive.


title: Utility

text: Very often the set of alternatives is not finite, because even if the number of goods is finite, the quantity chosen can be any real number on an interval. A commonly specified Choice Set in Consumer Choice is formula_8, where formula_9 is the number of goods. In this case, there exists a continuous utility function to represent a consumer's preferences if and only if the consumer's preferences are complete, transitive and continuous.


title: Utility

text: Utility is usually applied by economists to such constructs as the indifference curve, which plot the combination of commodities that an individual would accept to maintain a given level of satisfaction. Utility and indifference curves are used by economists to understand the causes of demand curves as part of supply and demand analysis, which is used to analyze the workings of goods markets.


title: Utility

text: A diagram of a general indifference curve is shown below (Figure 1). The vertical axes and the horizontal axes represent an individual's consumption of commodity Y and X respectively. All the combinations of commodity X and Y along the same indifference curve are regarded indifferently by individuals, which means all the combinations along an indifference curve result in the same value of utility.


title: Utility

text: Individual utility and social utility can be construed as the value of a utility function and a social welfare function respectively. When coupled with production or commodity constraints, by some assumptions these functions can be used to analyze Pareto efficiency, such as illustrated by Edgeworth boxes in contract curves. Such efficiency is a major concept in welfare economics.


title: Utility

text: In finance, utility is applied to generate an individual's price for an asset known as the indifference price. Utility functions are also related to risk measures, with the most common example being the entropic risk measure.


title: Utility

text: For artificial intelligence, utility functions are used to convey the value of various outcomes to intelligent agents. This allows the agents to plan actions with the goal of maximizing the utility (or "value") of available choices.


title: Utility

text: Preference, as human's specific likes and dislikes, is used primarily when individuals make choices or decisions among different alternatives. Individual preferences are influenced by various factors such as geographical location, gender, cultures and education. The ranking of utility indicates individuals’ preferences.


title: Utility

text: Although preferences are the conventional foundation of microeconomics, it is often convenient to represent preferences with a utility function and analyze human behavior indirectly with utility functions. Let "X" be the consumption set, the set of all mutually-exclusive baskets the consumer could conceivably consume. The consumer's utility function formula_10 ranks each package in the consumption set. If the consumer strictly prefers "x" to "y" or is indifferent between them, then formula_11.


title: Utility

text: For example, suppose a consumer's consumption set is "X" = {nothing, 1 apple,1 orange, 1 apple and 1 orange, 2 apples, 2 oranges}, and his utility function is "u"(nothing) = 0, "u"(1 apple) = 1, "u"(1 orange) = 2, "u"(1 apple and 1 orange) = 5, "u"(2 apples) = 2 and "u"(2 oranges) = 4. Then this consumer prefers 1 orange to 1 apple, but prefers one of each to 2 oranges.


title: Utility

text: In micro-economic models, there are usually a finite set of L commodities, and a consumer may consume an arbitrary amount of each commodity. This gives a consumption set of formula_12, and each package formula_13 is a vector containing the amounts of each commodity. For the example, there are two commodities: apples and oranges. If we say apples is the first commodity, and oranges the second, then the consumption set is formula_14 and "u"(0, 0) = 0, "u"(1, 0) = 1, "u"(0, 1) = 2, "u"(1, 1) = 5, "u"(2, 0) = 2, "u"(0, 2) = 4 as before. Note that for "u" to be a utility function on "X", however, it must be defined for every package in "X", so now the function needs to be defined for fractional apples and oranges too. One function that would fit these numbers is formula_15


title: Utility

text: Assume an individual has two choices, A and B. By ranking the two choices, one and only one of the following relationships is true: an individual strictly prefers A (A>B); an individual strictly prefers B (B>A); an individual is indifferent between A and B (A=B).


title: Utility

text: Individuals’ preferences are consistent over bundles. If an individual prefers bundle A to bundle B, and prefers bundle B to bundle C, then it can be assumed that the individual prefers bundle A to bundle C.


title: Utility

text: All else being constant, individuals always prefer more of positive goods rather than negative goods, vice versa. In terms of the indifferent curves, individuals will always prefer bundles that are on a higher indifference curve. In other words, all else being the same, more is better than less of the commodity.


title: Utility

text: It was recognized that utility could not be measured or observed directly, so instead economists devised a way to infer relative utilities from observed choice. These 'revealed preferences', as termed by Paul Samuelson, were revealed e.g. in people's willingness to pay:


title: Utility

text: Utility is assumed to be correlative to Desire or Want. It has been argued already that desires cannot be measured directly, but only indirectly, by the outward phenomena which they cause: and that in those cases with which economics is mainly concerned the measure is found by the price which a person is willing to pay for the fulfillment or satisfaction of his desire.


title: Utility

text: For financial applications, e.g. portfolio optimization, an investor chooses a financial portfolio which maximizes his/her own utility function, or, equivalently, minimizes his/her risk measure. For example, modern portfolio theory selects variance as a measure of risk; other popular theories are expected utility theory, and prospect theory. To determine a specific utility function for any given investor, one could design a questionnaire procedure with questions in the form: How much would you pay for "x%" chance of getting "y"? Revealed preference theory suggests a more direct method: observe a portfolio "X*" which an investor currently has, and then find a utility function/risk measure such that "X*" becomes an optimal portfolio.


title: Utility

text: There has been some controversy concerning whether the utility of a commodity can be measured or not. At one time, it was assumed that the consumer was able to say exactly how much utility he got from the commodity. The economists who made this assumption belonged to the 'cardinalist school' of economics. Presently utility functions, expressing utility as a function of the amounts of the various goods consumed, are treated as either "cardinal" or "ordinal", depending on whether they are or are not interpreted as providing more information than simply the rank ordering of preferences among bundles of goods, such as information concerning the strength of preferences.


title: Utility

text: Cardinal utility states that the utilities obtained from consumption can be measured and ranked objectively and are representable by numbers. There are fundamental assumptions of cardinal utility. Economic agents should be able to rank different bundles of goods based on their own preferences or utilities, and also sort different transitions of two bundles of goods.


title: Utility

text: A cardinal utility function can be transformed to another utility function by a positive linear transformation (multiplying by a positive number, and adding some other number); however, both utility functions represent the same preferences.


title: Utility

text: When cardinal utility is assumed, the magnitude of utility differences is treated as an ethically or behaviorally significant quantity. For example, suppose a cup of orange juice has utility of 120 "utils", a cup of tea has a utility of 80 utils, and a cup of water has a utility of 40 utils. With cardinal utility, it can be concluded that the cup of orange juice is better than the cup of tea by exactly the same amount by which the cup of tea is better than the cup of water. Formally, this means that if a person has a cup of tea, he or she would be willing to take any bet with a probability, p, greater than .5 of getting a cup of juice, with a risk of getting a cup of water equal to 1-p. One cannot conclude, however, that the cup of tea is two thirds of the goodness of the cup of juice, because this conclusion would depend not only on magnitudes of utility differences, but also on the "zero" of utility. For example, if the "zero" of utility was located at -40, then a cup of orange juice would be 160 utils more than zero, a cup of tea 120 utils more than zero. Cardinal utility can be considered as the assumption that utility can be measured by quantifiable characteristics, such as height, weight, temperature, etc.


title: Utility

text: Neoclassical economics has largely retreated from using cardinal utility functions as the basis of economic behavior. A notable exception is in the context of analyzing choice with conditions of risk (see below).


title: Utility

text: Sometimes cardinal utility is used to aggregate utilities across persons, to create a social welfare function.


title: Utility

text: Instead of giving actual numbers over different bundles, ordinal utilities are only the rankings of utilities received from different bundles of goods or services. For example, ordinal utility could tell that having two ice creams provide a greater utility to individuals in comparison to one ice cream but could not tell exactly how much extra utility received by the individual. Ordinal utility, it does not require individuals to specify how much extra utility he or she received from the preferred bundle of goods or services in comparison to other bundles. They are only required to tell which bundles they prefer.


title: Utility

text: When ordinal utilities are used, differences in utils (values assumed by the utility function) are treated as ethically or behaviorally meaningless: the utility index encodes a full behavioral ordering between members of a choice set, but tells nothing about the related "strength of preferences". For the above example, it would only be possible to say that juice is preferred to tea to water. Thus, ordinal utility utilizes comparisons, such as "preferred to", "no more", "less than", etc.


title: Utility

text: If a function formula_16 is ordinal, it is equivalent to the function formula_17, because taking the 3rd power is an increasing monotone (or monotonic) transformation. This means that the ordinal preference induced by these functions is the same (although they are two different functions). In contrast, if formula_16 is cardinal, it is not equivalent to formula_17.


title: Utility

text: For many decision models, utility functions are determined by the problem formulation. For some situations, the decision maker's preference must be elicited and represented by a utility (or objective) scalar-valued function. The methods existing for constructing such functions are collected in the proceedings of two dedicated conferences.


title: Utility

text: The mathematical foundations for the most common types of utility functions — quadratic and additive — were laid down by Gerard Debreu, and the methods for their construction from both ordinal and cardinal data, in particular from interviewing a decision maker, were developed by Andranik Tangian.


title: Utility

text: In order to simplify calculations, various alternative assumptions have been made concerning details of human preferences, and these imply various alternative utility functions such as:


title: Utility

text: Most utility functions used for modeling or theory are well-behaved. They are usually monotonic and quasi-concave. However, it is possible for preferences not to be representable by a utility function. An example is lexicographic preferences which are not continuous and cannot be represented by a continuous utility function.


title: Utility

text: Economists distinguish between total utility and marginal utility. Total utility is the utility of an alternative, an entire consumption bundle or situation in life. The rate of change of utility from changing the quantity of one good consumed is termed the marginal utility of that good. Marginal utility therefore measures the slope of the utility function with respect to the changes of one good. Marginal utility usually decreases with consumption of the good, the idea of "diminishing marginal utility". In calculus notation, the marginal utility of good X is formula_20. When a good's marginal utility is positive, additional consumption of it increases utility; if zero, the consumer is satiated and indifferent about consuming more; if negative, the consumer would pay to reduce his consumption.


title: Utility

text: Rational individuals only consume additional units of goods if it increases the marginal utility. However, the law of diminishing marginal utility means an additional unit consumed brings a less marginal utility than that brought by the previous unit consumed. For example, drinking one bottle of water makes a thirsty person satisfied; as the consumption of water increases, he may feel begin to feel bad which causes the marginal utility to decrease to zero or even become negative. Furthermore, this is also used to analyze progressive taxes as the greater taxes can result in the loss of utility.


title: Utility

text: Marginal rate of substitution is the slope of the indifference curve, which measures how much an individual is willing to switch from one good to another. Using a mathematic equation, formula_21keeping U (x1,x2) constant. Thus, MRS is how much an individual is willing to pay for consuming a greater amount of x1.


title: Utility

text: Expected utility theory deals with the analysis of choices among risky projects with multiple (possibly multidimensional) outcomes.


title: Utility

text: The St. Petersburg paradox was first proposed by Nicholas Bernoulli in 1713 and solved by Daniel Bernoulli in 1738. D. Bernoulli argued that the paradox could be resolved if decision-makers displayed risk aversion and argued for a logarithmic cardinal utility function. (Analysis of international survey data during the 21st century has shown that insofar as utility represents happiness, as for utilitarianism, it is indeed proportional to log of income.)


title: Utility

text: The first important use of the expected utility theory was that of John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, who used the assumption of expected utility maximization in their formulation of game theory.


title: Utility

text: Von Neumann and Morgenstern addressed situations in which the outcomes of choices are not known with certainty, but have probabilities associated with them.


title: Utility

text: A notation for a "lottery" is as follows: if options A and B have probability "p" and 1 − "p" in the lottery, we write it as a linear combination:


title: Utility

text: By making some reasonable assumptions about the way choices behave, von Neumann and Morgenstern showed that if an agent can choose between the lotteries, then this agent has a utility function such that the desirability of an arbitrary lottery can be computed as a linear combination of the utilities of its parts, with the weights being their probabilities of occurring.


title: Utility

text: This is termed the "expected utility theorem". The required assumptions are four axioms about the properties of the agent's preference relation over 'simple lotteries', which are lotteries with just two options. Writing formula_26 to mean 'A is weakly preferred to B' ('A is preferred at least as much as B'), the axioms are:


title: Utility

text: In more formal language: A von Neumann–Morgenstern utility function is a function from choices to the real numbers:


title: Utility

text: which assigns a real number to every outcome in a way that represents the agent's preferences over simple lotteries. Using the four assumptions mentioned above, the agent will prefer a lottery formula_48 to a lottery formula_49 if and only if, for the utility function characterizing that agent, the expected utility of formula_48 is greater than the expected utility of formula_49:


title: Utility

text: Of all the axioms, independence is the most often discarded. A variety of generalized expected utility theories have arisen, most of which omit or relax the independence axiom.


title: Utility

text: Castagnoli and LiCalzi (1996) and Bordley and LiCalzi (2000) provided another interpretation for Von Neumann and Morgenstern's theory. Specifically for any utility function, there exists a hypothetical reference lottery with the expected utility of an arbitrary lottery being its probability of performing no worse than the reference lottery. Suppose success is defined as getting an outcome no worse than the outcome of the reference lottery. Then this mathematical equivalence means that maximizing expected utility is equivalent to maximizing the probability of success. In many contexts, this makes the concept of utility easier to justify and to apply. For example, a firm's utility might be the probability of meeting uncertain future customer expectations.


title: Utility

text: An indirect utility function gives the optimal attainable value of a given utility function, which depends on the prices of the goods and the income or wealth level that the individual possesses.


title: Utility

text: One use of the indirect utility concept is the notion of the utility of money. The (indirect) utility function for money is a nonlinear function that is bounded and asymmetric about the origin. The utility function is concave in the positive region, representing the phenomenon of diminishing marginal utility. The boundedness represents the fact that beyond a certain amount money ceases being useful at all, as the size of any economy at that time is itself bounded. The asymmetry about the origin represents the fact that gaining and losing money can have radically different implications both for individuals and businesses. The non-linearity of the utility function for money has profound implications in decision-making processes: in situations where outcomes of choices influence utility by gains or losses of money, which are the norm for most business settings, the optimal choice for a given decision depends on the possible outcomes of all other decisions in the same time-period.


title: Utility

text: Individuals' consumptions are constrained by their budget allowance. The graph of budget line is a linear, downward-sloping line between X and Y axes. All the bundles of consumption under the budget line allow individuals to consume without using the whole budget as the total budget is greater than the total cost of bundles (Figure 2). If only considers prices and quantities of two goods in one bundle, a budget constraint could be formulated as formula_53, where p1 and p2 are prices of the two goods, X1 and X2 are quantities of the two goods.


title: Utility

text: Rational consumers wish to maximise their utility. However, as they have budget constraints, a change of price would affect the quantity of demand. There are two factors could explain this situation:


title: Utility

text: Cambridge economist Joan Robinson famously criticized utility for being a circular concept: "Utility is the quality in commodities that makes individuals want to buy them, and the fact that individuals want to buy commodities shows that they have utility". Robinson also stated that because the theory assumes that preferences are fixed this means that utility is not a testable assumption. This is so because if we observe changes of peoples' behavior in relation to a change in prices or a change in budget constraint we can never be sure to what extent the change in behavior was due to the change of price or budget constraint and how much was due to a change of preference. This criticism is similar to that of the philosopher Hans Albert who argued that the "ceteris paribus" (all else equal) conditions on which the marginalist theory of demand rested rendered the theory itself a meaningless tautology, incapable of being tested experimentally. In essence, a curve of demand and supply (a theoretical line of quantity of a product which would have been offered or requested for given price) is purely ontological and could never have been demonstrated empirically.


title: Utility

text: Another criticism derives from the assertion that neither cardinal nor ordinal utility are observable empirically in the real world. For the case of cardinal utility it is impossible to measure the degree of satisfaction "quantitatively" when someone consumes or purchases an apple. For ordinal utility, it is impossible to determine what choices were made when someone purchases, for example, an orange. Any act would involve preference over a vast set of choices (such as apple, orange juice, other vegetable, vitamin C tablets, exercise, not purchasing, etc.).


title: Utility

text: Other questions of what arguments ought to be included in a utility function are difficult to answer, yet seem necessary to understanding utility. Whether people gain utility from coherence of wants, beliefs or a sense of duty is important to understanding their behavior in the utility organon. Likewise, choosing between alternatives is itself a process of determining what to consider as alternatives, a question of choice within uncertainty.


title: Utility

text: An evolutionary psychology theory is that utility may be better considered as due to preferences that maximized evolutionary fitness in the ancestral environment but not necessarily in the current one.


title: The Blacklist (season 1)

text: The first season of the American crime thriller television series "The Blacklist" premiered on NBC on September 23, 2013. The season was produced by Davis Entertainment, Universal Television, and Sony Pictures Television, and the executive producers are Jon Bokenkamp, John Davis, John Eisendrath, John Fox, and Joe Carnahan.


title: The Blacklist (season 1)

text: The first season introduces Raymond Reddington (James Spader), Elizabeth "Liz" Keen (Megan Boone) and the members of the Task Force, a multiagency law enforcement working group dedicated to hunting down Reddington. Reddington surrenders to the FBI and offers to identify and help capture the criminals he has worked with, whom he calls "The Blacklist", but only if he is allowed to work with Liz Keen, a rookie profiler at the FBI. He refuses to explain why Liz must be involved. The Reddington Task Force, led by Assistant Director Harold Cooper (Harry Lennix), becomes the lead law enforcement agency responsible for capturing or killing the members of the Blacklist at Reddington's behest (usually to Red's benefit), which causes conflicts particularly for Special Agent Donald Ressler (Diego Klattenhoff), who was originally tasked with capturing Reddington. This is the only season for Meera Malik (Parminder Nagra), a CIA officer and member of the Task Force, who is killed in the season finale. The season also introduces series antagonist Milos Kirchoff (Peter Stormare), AKA Berlin, a former Russian KGB officer with a longstanding hatred of Reddington. A major subplot for the season is Elizabeth Keen's discovery that her husband Tom Keen (Ryan Eggold), a schoolteacher to all appearances, is actually a covert operative with an unknown agenda and Liz's efforts to discover who he actually is and who sent him. A second subplot involves the Cabal, a shadowy multinational group that holds positions of influence in government and business, and their interest in Reddington's activities. The Cabal is usually represented by Alan Fitch (Alan Alda), the Deputy Director of National Intelligence, who tries to maintain a civil relationship with Reddington despite the Cabal's misgivings while trying to determine what Reddington actually knows.


title: The Blacklist (season 1)

text: The first season of "The Blacklist" received strong reviews from television critics. "The Blacklist" has a Metacritic score of 74 out of 100 based on reviews from 31 critics. The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reports an 85% approval rating based on 52 reviews, with an average score of 7.18/10. The consensus reads: "James Spader is riveting as a criminal-turned-informant, and his presence goes a long way toward making this twisty but occasionally implausible crime procedural compelling".


title: The Blacklist (season 1)

text: David Wiegand of the "San Francisco Chronicle" said about the pilot: "You think you know this situation and how it will turn out, but there are surprising, yet entirely credible, twists throughout Monday's episode". Robert Bianco of "USA Today" said: ""The Blacklist" is a solid weekly crime show built around a genuine TV star. That's the kind of series the networks have to be able to pull off to survive. And with Spader in command, odds are NBC will". Tim Goodman of "The Hollywood Reporter" praised both Spader's performance and the procedural elements of the show: "There's an overarching element to the premise as well that makes it intriguing without making it overly complicated".


title: Theft

text: Theft is the act of taking another person's property or services without that person's permission or consent with the intent to deprive the rightful owner of it. The word "theft" is also used as a synonym or informal shorthand term for some crimes against property, such as larceny, robbery, embezzlement, extortion, blackmail, or receiving stolen property. In some jurisdictions, "theft" is considered to be synonymous with "larceny", while in others, "theft" is defined more narrowly. Someone who carries out an act of theft may be described as a "thief" (: thieves).


title: Theft

text: "Theft" is the name of a statutory offence in California, Canada, England and Wales, Hong Kong, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, and the Australian states of South Australia and Victoria.


title: Theft

text: The "actus reus" of theft is usually defined as an unauthorized taking, keeping, or using of another's property which must be accompanied by a "mens rea" of dishonesty and the intent to permanently deprive the owner or rightful possessor of that property or its use.


title: Theft

text: For example, if X goes to a restaurant and, by mistake, takes Y's scarf instead of her own, she has physically deprived Y of the use of the property (which is the "actus reus") but the mistake prevents X from forming the "mens rea" (i.e., because she believes that she is the owner, she is not dishonest and does not intend to deprive the "owner" of it) so no crime has been committed at this point. But if she realizes the mistake when she gets home and could return the scarf to Y, she will steal the scarf if she dishonestly keeps it (see theft by finding). Note that there may be civil liability for the torts of trespass to chattels or conversion in either eventuality.


title: Theft

text: The following are the countries with the most cases of theft, as well as the respective rates per 100,000 people, according to the United Nations in 2018.


title: Theft

text: Theft is defined in section 134 of the "Criminal Consolidation Act" 1935 (SA) as being where a person deals with property dishonestly, without the owner's consent and intending to deprive the owner of their property, or make a serious encroachment on the proprietary rights of the owner.


title: Theft

text: Under this law, encroachment on proprietary rights means that the property is dealt with in a way that creates a substantial risk that the property will not be returned to the owner, or that the value of the property will be greatly diminished when the owner does get it back. Also, where property is treated as the defendant's own property to dispose of, disregarding the actual property owner's rights.


title: Theft

text: For a basic offence, a person found guilty of this offence is liable for imprisonment of up to 10 years.


title: Theft

text: For an aggravated offence, a person found guilty of this offence is liable for imprisonment of up to 15 years.


title: Theft

text: Theft is defined in the "Crimes Act" 1958 (Vic) as when a person "dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it.". The actus reus and mens rea are defined as follows:


title: Theft

text: Appropriation is defined in section 73(4) of the "Crimes Act" 1958 (Vic) as the assumption of any of the owner's rights. It does not have to be all the owner's rights, as long as at least one right has been assumed. If the owner gave their consent to the appropriation there cannot be an appropriation. However, if this consent is obtained by deception, this consent is vitiated.


title: Theft

text: Property – defined in section 71(1) of the "Crimes Act" 1958 (Vic) as being both tangible property, including money and intangible property. Information has been held not be property.


title: Theft

text: Belonging to another – section 73(5) of the "Crimes Act" 1958 (Vic) provides that property belongs to another if that person has ownership, possession, or a proprietary interest in the property. Property can belong to more than one person. sections 73(9) & 73(10) deal with situations where the accused receives property under an obligation or by mistake.


title: Theft

text: Whether a person's conduct is dishonest is a question of fact to be determined by the jury, based on their own knowledge and experience. As with the definition in Victoria, it contains definitions of what is not dishonesty, including a belief in a legal claim of right or a belief the owner could not be found.


title: Theft

text: Intention to permanently deprive – defined at s.73(12) as treating property as it belongs to the accused, rather than the owner.


title: Theft

text: Dishonestly – section 73(2) of the "Crimes Act" 1958 (Vic) creates a negative definition of the term 'dishonestly'. The section deems only three circumstances when the accused is deemed to have been acting honestly. These are a belief in a legal claim of right, a belief that the owner would have consented, or a belief the owner could not be found.


title: Theft

text: In the general definition above, the Supreme Court of Canada has construed "anything" very broadly, stating that it is not restricted to tangibles, but includes intangibles. To be the subject of theft it must, however:


title: Theft

text: Because of this, confidential information cannot be the subject of theft, as it is not capable of being taken as only tangibles can be taken. It cannot be converted, not because it is an intangible, but because, save in very exceptional far‑fetched circumstances, the owner would never be deprived of it. However, the theft of trade secrets in certain circumstances does constitute part of the offence of economic espionage, which can be prosecuted under s. 19 of the "Security of Information Act".


title: Theft

text: For the purposes of punishment, Section 334 divides theft into two separate offences, according to the value and nature of the goods stolen:


title: Theft

text: Where a motor vehicle is stolen, Section 333.1 provides for a maximum punishment of 10 years for an indictable offence (and a minimum sentence of six months for a third or subsequent conviction), and a maximum sentence of 18 months on summary conviction.


title: Theft

text: The elements of this offence in Hong Kong is almost the same as in England and Wales, because the Theft Ordinance in Hong Kong was drafted based on the Theft Act 1968 (and the Theft Act 1978) in UK. However, the "Ghosh Test" for dishonest in Hong Kong has been replaced by the "Ivey Test" in England and Wales by the Supreme Court. It is the main difference between the offence of theft in these two jurisdictions.


title: Theft

text: Theft is a criminal activity in India with punishments which may lead to jail term. Below are excerpts of laws of Indian penal Code which state definitions and punishments for theft.


title: Theft

text: Theft is a statutory offence, created by section 4(1) of the Criminal Justice (Theft and Fraud Offences) Act 2001.


title: Theft

text: According to the Romanian Penal Code a person committing theft ("furt") can face a penalty ranging from 1 to 20 years.


title: Theft

text: In England and Wales, theft is a statutory offence, created by section 1(1) of the Theft Act 1968. This offence replaces the former offences of larceny, embezzlement and fraudulent conversion.


title: Theft

text: The marginal note to section 1 of the Theft Act 1968 describes it as a "basic definition" of theft. Sections 1(1) and (2) provide:


title: Theft

text: Sections 2 to 6 of the Theft Act 1968 have effect as regards the interpretation and operation of section 1 of that Act. Except as otherwise provided by that Act, sections 2 to 6 of that Act apply only for the purposes of section 1 of that Act.


title: Theft

text: Edward Griew said that section 4(1) could, without changing its meaning, be reduced, by omitting words, to:


title: Theft

text: The words "other intangible property" include export quotas that are transferable for value on a temporary or permanent basis.


title: Theft

text: Electricity cannot be stolen. It is not property within the meaning of section 4 and is not appropriated by switching on a current. "Cf." the offence of abstracting electricity under section 13.


title: Theft

text: Section 5 "belonging to another" requires a distinction to be made between ownership, possession and control:


title: Theft

text: So if A buys a car for cash, A will be the owner. If A then lends the car to B Ltd (a company), B Ltd will have possession. C, an employee of B Ltd then uses the car and has control. If C uses the car in an unauthorized way, C will steal the car from A and B Ltd. This means that it is possible to steal one's own property.


title: Theft

text: In R v Turner, the owner removed his car from the forecourt of a garage where it had been left for collection after repair. He intended to avoid paying the bill. There was an appropriation of the car because it had been physically removed but there were two issues to be decided: