BAA has won its appeal against an order to sell three of the seven UK airports it runs on the grounds that the ruling panel was affected by "apparent bias".But the appeal tribunal rejected BAA's argument that it was being forced to sell the airports too quickly. The Competition Commission had ruled in March that BAA must sell Gatwick, Stansted and either Edinburgh or Glasgow airports within two years. BAA has already sold Gatwick but the judgement will not affect that sale.
BAA has won its appeal against an order to sell three of the seven UK airports it runs on the grounds that the ruling panel was affected by "apparent bias".
But the appeal tribunal rejected BAA's argument that it was being forced to sell the airports too quickly.
The Competition Commission had ruled in March that BAA must sell Gatwick, Stansted and either Edinburgh or Glasgow airports within two years.
BAA has already sold Gatwick but the judgement will not affect that sale.
According to a report by Business Week's Spencer E. Ante, Twitter's search deals with Google and Microsoft made the company about $25 million - enough to turn Twitter into a profitable business in 2009. According to these reports - which Twitter did not comment on - the deal with Google made Twitter about $15 million this year and a similar deal with Microsoft generated about $10 million in revenue. The idea that Twitter made a profit from these deals is based on the assumption that the company's annual operating costs are roughly $25 million. Twitter, of course, doesn't release any information about its operating costs or the revenue it made from these deals, so we have to take this estimate with a grain of salt.
According to a report by Business Week's Spencer E. Ante, Twitter's search deals with Google and Microsoft made the company about $25 million - enough to turn Twitter into a profitable business in 2009. According to these reports - which Twitter did not comment on - the deal with Google made Twitter about $15 million this year and a similar deal with Microsoft generated about $10 million in revenue.
The idea that Twitter made a profit from these deals is based on the assumption that the company's annual operating costs are roughly $25 million. Twitter, of course, doesn't release any information about its operating costs or the revenue it made from these deals, so we have to take this estimate with a grain of salt.
Dutch specialist automaker Spyker Cars has submitted a revised last-minute offer to buy the Saab car firm from General Motors, offering hope that thousands of jobs could be saved. The offer on Sunday follows an announcement from GM that it would begin winding down the Swedish firm after failing to find a buyer. GM has said it is evaluating the new Spyker bid, having rejected an earlier offer from the firm. Victor R. Muller, CEO of the Dutch sports carmaker, said he was "very confident" that the renewed offer would remove previous obstacles in the negotiations enabling a deal to go through by the end of December.
Dutch specialist automaker Spyker Cars has submitted a revised last-minute offer to buy the Saab car firm from General Motors, offering hope that thousands of jobs could be saved.
The offer on Sunday follows an announcement from GM that it would begin winding down the Swedish firm after failing to find a buyer.
GM has said it is evaluating the new Spyker bid, having rejected an earlier offer from the firm.
Victor R. Muller, CEO of the Dutch sports carmaker, said he was "very confident" that the renewed offer would remove previous obstacles in the negotiations enabling a deal to go through by the end of December.
I have recently republished my lecture notes on the history of theories of Trade Development and Foreign Debt. (Available from Amazon) In this book, I provide the basis for refuting Samuelson's factor-price equalization theorem, IMF-World Bank austerity programs, and the purchasing-parity theory of exchange rates. These ideas were lapses back from earlier analysis, whose pedigree I trace. In view of their regressive character, I think that the question that needs to be asked is how the discipline was untracked and trivialized from its classical flowering? How did it become marginalized and trivialized, taking for granted the social structures and dynamics that should be the substance and focal point of its analysis? As John Williams quipped already in 1929 about the practical usefulness of international trade theory, "I have often felt like the man who stammered and finally learned to say 'Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers' but found it hard to work into conversation." But now that such prattling has become the essence of conversation among economists, the important question is how universities, students and the rest of the world have come to accept it and even award prizes in it! To answer this question, my book describes the "intellectual engineering" that has turned the economics discipline into a public relations exercise for the rentier classes criticized by the classical economists: landlords, bankers and monopolists. It was largely to counter criticisms of their unearned income and wealth, after all, that the post-classical reaction aimed to limit the conceptual "toolbox" of economists to become so unrealistic, narrow-minded and self-serving to the status quo. It has ended up as an intellectual ploy to distract attention away from the financial and property dynamics that are polarizing our world between debtors and creditors, property owners and renters, while steering politics from democracy to oligarchy. Bad economic content starts with bad methodology. Ever since John Stuart Mill in the 1840s, economics has been described as a deductive discipline of axiomatic assumptions. Nobel Prizewinners from Paul Samuelson to Bill Vickery have described the criterion for economic excellence to be the consistency of its assumptions, not their realism.[2] Typical of this approach is Nobel Prizewinner Paul Samuelson's conclusion in his famous 1939 article on "The Gains from International Trade": "In pointing out the consequences of a set of abstract assumptions, one need not be committed unduly as to the relation between reality and these assumptions." This attitude did not deter him from drawing policy conclusions affecting the material world in which real people live. These conclusions are diametrically opposed to the empirically successful protectionism by which Britain, the United States and Germany rose to industrial supremacy. Typical of this now widespread attitude is the textbook Microeconomics by William Vickery, winner of the 1997 Nobel Economics Prize: "Economic theory proper, indeed, is nothing more than a system of logical relations between certain sets of assumptions and the conclusions derived from them... The validity of a theory proper does not depend on the correspondence or lack of it between the assumptions of the theory or its conclusions and observations in the real world. A theory as an internally consistent system is valid if the conclusions follow logically from its premises, and the fact that neither the premises nor theconclusions correspond to reality may show that the theory is not very useful, but does not invalidate it. In any pure theory, all propositions are essentially tautological, in the sense that the results are implicit in the assumptions made." Such disdain for empirical verification is not found in the physical sciences. Its popularity in the social sciences is sponsored by vested interests. There is always self-interest behind methodological madness. That is because success requires heavy subsidies from special interests, who benefit from an erroneous, misleading or deceptive economic logic. Why promote unrealistic abstractions, after all, if not to distract attention from reforms aimed at creating rules that oblige people actually to earn their income rather than simply extracting it from the rest of the economy?
These ideas were lapses back from earlier analysis, whose pedigree I trace. In view of their regressive character, I think that the question that needs to be asked is how the discipline was untracked and trivialized from its classical flowering? How did it become marginalized and trivialized, taking for granted the social structures and dynamics that should be the substance and focal point of its analysis? As John Williams quipped already in 1929 about the practical usefulness of international trade theory, "I have often felt like the man who stammered and finally learned to say 'Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers' but found it hard to work into conversation." But now that such prattling has become the essence of conversation among economists, the important question is how universities, students and the rest of the world have come to accept it and even award prizes in it!
To answer this question, my book describes the "intellectual engineering" that has turned the economics discipline into a public relations exercise for the rentier classes criticized by the classical economists: landlords, bankers and monopolists. It was largely to counter criticisms of their unearned income and wealth, after all, that the post-classical reaction aimed to limit the conceptual "toolbox" of economists to become so unrealistic, narrow-minded and self-serving to the status quo. It has ended up as an intellectual ploy to distract attention away from the financial and property dynamics that are polarizing our world between debtors and creditors, property owners and renters, while steering politics from democracy to oligarchy.
Bad economic content starts with bad methodology. Ever since John Stuart Mill in the 1840s, economics has been described as a deductive discipline of axiomatic assumptions. Nobel Prizewinners from Paul Samuelson to Bill Vickery have described the criterion for economic excellence to be the consistency of its assumptions, not their realism.[2] Typical of this approach is Nobel Prizewinner Paul Samuelson's conclusion in his famous 1939 article on "The Gains from International Trade":
"In pointing out the consequences of a set of abstract assumptions, one need not be committed unduly as to the relation between reality and these assumptions."
This attitude did not deter him from drawing policy conclusions affecting the material world in which real people live. These conclusions are diametrically opposed to the empirically successful protectionism by which Britain, the United States and Germany rose to industrial supremacy.
Typical of this now widespread attitude is the textbook Microeconomics by William Vickery, winner of the 1997 Nobel Economics Prize:
"Economic theory proper, indeed, is nothing more than a system of logical relations between certain sets of assumptions and the conclusions derived from them... The validity of a theory proper does not depend on the correspondence or lack of it between the assumptions of the theory or its conclusions and observations in the real world. A theory as an internally consistent system is valid if the conclusions follow logically from its premises, and the fact that neither the premises nor theconclusions correspond to reality may show that the theory is not very useful, but does not invalidate it. In any pure theory, all propositions are essentially tautological, in the sense that the results are implicit in the assumptions made."
Such disdain for empirical verification is not found in the physical sciences. Its popularity in the social sciences is sponsored by vested interests. There is always self-interest behind methodological madness. That is because success requires heavy subsidies from special interests, who benefit from an erroneous, misleading or deceptive economic logic. Why promote unrealistic abstractions, after all, if not to distract attention from reforms aimed at creating rules that oblige people actually to earn their income rather than simply extracting it from the rest of the economy?
The validity of a theory proper does not depend on the correspondence or lack of it between the assumptions of the theory or its conclusions and observations in the real world. A theory as an internally consistent system is valid if the conclusions follow logically from its premises, and the fact that neither the premises nor theconclusions correspond to reality may show that the theory is not very useful, but does not invalidate it.Such disdain for empirical verification is not found in the physical sciences.
The validity of a theory proper does not depend on the correspondence or lack of it between the assumptions of the theory or its conclusions and observations in the real world. A theory as an internally consistent system is valid if the conclusions follow logically from its premises, and the fact that neither the premises nor theconclusions correspond to reality may show that the theory is not very useful, but does not invalidate it.
Its popularity in the social sciences is sponsored by vested interests.
That follow on sentence from your quote is the qualifier. Economics is, despite all of the mathematical mumbo-jumbo surrounding it, a social science. That is, its theories are simply competing opinions detached from observable behaviour where the biggest backer wins. keep to the Fen Causeway
Disciplines that don't have the luxury of quantitative data where statistics can be applied (say, cultural anthropology as opposed to physical anthropology) fall under humanities, I guess, not social science. En un viejo país ineficiente, algo así como España entre dos guerras civiles, poseer una casa y poca hacienda y memoria ninguna. -- Gil de Biedma
Just because something looks algorithmic and has numbers in it doesn't mean that the algorithms are meaningful, interesting, or useful.
The entire NCE project was, is, and continues to be, PR and political spin.
my book describes the "intellectual engineering" that has turned the economics discipline into a public relations exercise for the rentier classes criticized by the classical economists: landlords, bankers and monopolists. It was largely to counter criticisms of their unearned income and wealth, after all, that the post-classical reaction aimed to limit the conceptual "toolbox" of economists to become so unrealistic, narrow-minded and self-serving to the status quo.
It turns out that Economics is Politics after all. En un viejo país ineficiente, algo así como España entre dos guerras civiles, poseer una casa y poca hacienda y memoria ninguna. -- Gil de Biedma
It turns out that Economics is Politics after all.
If I am going to do that I might as well go ahead and try to learn at least ordinary differential equations. Then I would better be able to follow Steve Keen's work. Any recommendations for Differential Equations for Dummies? Or is there such a book and is it useful? As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
This is the real scandal
my book describes the "intellectual engineering" that has turned the economics discipline into a public relations exercise for the rentier classes
That is the poster quote of the decade. I'd buy the book if I thought I'd understand it. keep to the Fen Causeway
