Business Process Management Report

Question: Examine about theBusiness Process Management Report. Answer: Presentation This report will look the parts of distributed computing in conveying better business process the board. The report takes a gander at the audit of article BPM in the Cloud and with it we would likewise take a gander at the supporting proof. We will likewise take a gander at the impact of cloud and different access stages. Aside from this we will take a gander at the impact of diminished forthright expenses. Aside from this we can likewise take a gander at the impact of progress in business IT frameworks. There are a few impacts of an IT based framework. We investigate every one of these angles. SaaS as a Hardware, Installation and Hosting Platform Since the nonappearance of customer programming made SaaS exceptionally famous. The innovation change was not enormous but rather the huge switch came up for BPM as far as item structure. At first the cost structure made the expense of facilitating and upkeep getting moved from the purchaser to the merchant this mirrored a significant issue for the cloud framework. At that point we can take a gander at the complex VPN organize which makes it hard to login to the customer framework since VPN availability should be there. According to other strong reports, SMAC based advances have a piece of the pie that has been ascending at the quick pace of 20% CAGR. Consequently there have been a few steep ascents. We can likewise observe that there are a few upgrades that have prompted a higher development throughout the years. Be that as it may, out of all the SMAC advances cloud administrations have seen the greatest development and market hugeness because of simplicity in flexibility. The multiplication of the SMAC based innovation advertise shows a quick improvement towards this sort of a market. B2B Collaboration The simplicity of B2B joint effort increments with cloud frameworks. While working together with individuals in different organizations, powerful firewall frameworks that have a disguised corporate framework gotten hard to utilize. The on-server establishment expenses can be diminished. There are an enormous number of littler arrangements and strategies that are not entirely doable. For BPM administrations there has been a battle to coordinate the simplicity of offering cases and other assignment directions to different types of communitarian spaces with regards to various organizations. Henceforth the B2B community exertion is decreased. Different organizations have capacities to create in this innovation space while Apple doesn't have the equivalent. They have additionally lingered behind with regards to internet providers. Decrease in Upfront Investment The on-server establishment expenses can be diminished. There are an enormous number of littler arrangements and methods that are not truly doable. Enormous associations are process arranged that regard the wellness of the BPM procedure. Without the forthright ventures and procedural difficulties the forthright speculation decreases essentially (Watfa, Najjar, Cheikha and Buali 2015). Let us take the case of Apple Not having the option to scale up its SMAC based administrations particularly the cloud administrations is a profound pull challenge for Apple. Different organizations have abilities to create in this innovation space while Apple doesn't have the equivalent. They have additionally lingered behind with regards to internet providers. These incorporate the disappointment of Apple Maps, MobileMe and others. They don't have interior ability to overcome this issue. They have to search for outside recruits. Apple is inside driven and don't have confidence in inorganic development to accomplish the conclusion of hole between the ability and the ideal final result. There will consistently been a higher danger of misalignment, Cloud has subbed the customary method of information stockpiling and accessibility. Consequently an articulation point ought to be reached to guarantee that there will be more noteworthy multiplication of effective customer inviting stages. Cloud has acquired the focal point of the business upon the shoppers. Purchasers would not leave and separate because of the manner in which distributed computing is taken care of since they work in the uncommon space of innovation quiet which surrenders to a wide scope of items into the primary overlay of SMAC based advancements. End Users and Clients Bring your own BPM arrangement turns out to be exceptionally hard for execution. In this manner making the arrangements self-propelled, which may need different procedures. The IT office determination process regularly includes a solicitation for proposition (RFP). These solicitation for proposition contain whatever the merchants can do with the given issue. Accordingly the highlights are included and subsequently the sellers discover this as a major driver. RFPs and expert firms have pushed BPM answers for incorporate more highlights and capacities however this has gotten progressively hard to reduce costs since there are certain costs which have been rising. The conventional strategies for contending are not, at this point being used to long haul food. Organizations need to thoroughly consider of the container and apply that information to get the best outcomes. These outcomes decide the impact of organizations that can achieve a progressive change in their methodology. This prompts the advancement of an unquestionably increasingly coordinated system. Market convictions and promoting methods are not explicit they can't be focused by a solitary strategy. Blue Ocean technique can likewise be believed to have affected the worth development model (Subramanian, V., Mungi, A., Sivakumar, and Viswanathan 2013). This procedure investigates the parts of significant worth direction and requires a Reconstructionist view to comprehend the effect of recently characterized changes in showcase dispatch and food. There are a few models in late setting that portray a blue sea procedure. Elements Change in Business and IT The two have broadly changed throughout the years inferable from the impact of IT combination and IT scene. In one of the examination articles we go over distributed computing and versatility. This shows the adjustment in the manner IT is seen nowadays it has become an income work for some associations. There are focuses in the class procedure where the Salesforce accounts are not constrained as records. There are reconciliations between the BPM framework and the outer frameworks. There are reliance changes in the manner devouring information is concerned (Schulte, Janiesch, Venugopal, Weber, and Hoenisch 2015). There are a few parts of procedure demonstrating and mess based procedure outline. In this manner the procedure of non-specialized businessmen to begin to information conditions along these lines forestalling agents to change process unreservedly. At that point comes the effect of clear division between end clients and IT individuals (Meyer, Louridas, Steijaert, Galeazzi, Rud a, and Radojevic 2013). We can likewise observe that there have been an enormous number of coordination among individuals that prompts a more prominent precise incorporation and coordination among individuals. In this way there are framework incorporation challenges that have been confronted. There is no framework mix is required so supervisors can keep the adjustments in process until there is security reached additionally there is a quantifiable and significant energy about the specialized framework mixes. From Collaboration to Processes As we talked about above how are shared endeavors incorporated to give a resultant procedure direction. Along these lines the procedure of social joint effort and cloud BPM arrangement with the benefit of taking a gander at the impacts of a brooding procedure of a huge part of work that comes through. There are additionally notable difficulties of detecting a client design with a layout based procedure as a characteristic advance must be thought about. The essential center must be the client experience and other communitarian territories of concern and solidarity (Zhao and Yue 2013). Accordingly the utilization of ACM based highlights. The cloud business is solid as far as its piece of the overall industry of relocation with near 40% of the IT application base. The dispersion system of cloud put together frameworks is essentially based with respect to its own establishment store capacity. The lead distributed computing frameworks bring the impact of single brand retail locations that can help get an a dependable balance of the organizations. The store design itself is a development and inventive edge (Jiang, Le, Wang, Sun and He 2011). Next comes the idea of cloud the executives and business process joining. The commonplace issue is about the BPM buy situations. We would likewise take a gander at how the Cloud brand works in the psyches of the end shopper. The circumstance examination will reflect how Cloud has prompted a more noteworthy expansion of market geologies. Cloud has even arrived at the phases on support in various applications (Payne 2016). Ace information of benefits creation and their ID creation gets simpler with cloud based framework. We can likewise observe that the advertiser associations investigate the parts of pushing the IT interface onto the BPM item. There are a few directors that investigate the advantages of Cloud BPM benefits that permit consistent library and other reliance activities. The future procedure is as yet dependent on development and configuration consequently cloud frameworks must glance at building better procedures. Cloud frameworks are entomb trustworthy and can stop to exist if there are a few issues of underestimation. Cloud is subsequently the path forward as far as procedure design. Cloud based frameworks have seen the benefit of brand faithful clients. This demonstrates the impact of brand cognizant customers in this innovation keen industry space. The cloud upheaval has acquired plenty of items have additionally been increasingly strong as is the SMAC based innovation as well. The plans have consistently been progressive. In the ongoing version they have gone remote. They are additionally attempting to take a shot at holographic screens. Similarity is a little test since the entirety of their items are good with other cloud incorporated items which Android has similarity with Windows Azure (Muthusamy and Jacobsen 2010). Cloud has been the serious advantaged stage for quite a while. As should be obvious that the six abilities referenced are the center preferences that Cloud registering plays on. It is a finished arrangement with a music player I Pod, at that point comes the tablet PC which is genuinely cutting-edge I

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purchase custom Transactional Model of Communication paper Correspondence is a demonstration of passing data starting with one individual then onto the next. It is significant, in this manner, that one guarantees that the recipient is in a situation to get the message (Balmud 2008, pp. 47-52). The criticism one gets from the recipient makes it simple to realize whether successful correspondence has happened. We impart during for our entire life, now and then even without knowing it. A few snags may emerge during the time spent correspondence. These incorporate uneasiness, absence of planning, and lewd behavior among others. Life is brimming with such circumstances. Numerous individuals will experience such situations at any rate every so often (Schramm 1954, pp. 5-15). The greater part of individuals feel that it is anything but difficult to impart; individuals feel that they are consistently ready to make great correspondence to the individuals around. Sadly, it isn't so natural. Correspondence needs a great deal of arrangement (Schramm 195 4, pp. 5-15). Individuals ought to be prepared to impart even in exceptionally troublesome minutes. In any case, they should never accept that they have had the option to convey what they needed to. All things considered, people ought to be prepared to assess the criticism from the beneficiaries. A decent input ought to be what they should use to decide how great they are in correspondence. Depiction of the circumstance I would say, I have been in places, where I have needed to pass on a specific message however couldn't. Some of the time, I have been disillusioned, when a few people need to pass on specific messages, exceptionally essential, yet are hindered over the span of doing as such. About a month prior, I went to a specific café inside the city. I needed to do conveyances for vegetables, and furthermore get the installment for prior conveyances. I discovered that the administration had changed and new individuals had been set up. However, I had done this numerous prior months, I was out of nowhere uncomfortable. The administrator responsible for provisions was unfamiliar to me. This implied I needed to give the subtleties of what my identity was, the reason I needed to see him. The gathering took a brief timeframe. Nervousness developed inside me and I was unable to pass on the fundamental data easily. After the meeting was finished, the gracefully supervisor was dubious of who I truly was. He had numerous inquiries that he needed me to reply in another meeting. Investigation of the circumstance Having been in the business for long, I had never made sense of that administration would change. I never arranged for changes, expecting that correspondence would consistently be simple. That particular day demonstrated that I have never made great arrangements most definitely. Correspondence, as I had expected, could have never been upset. Be that as it may, this was an off-base suspicion. I expected to make ajustments even before I set out toward the eatery that particular day. Nonetheless, I do accept that the administrator would have allowed me to clarify all the data that he had to know. I accept that he hopped into the finish of what my identity was. Having been ordinary in the premises, as I disclosed to him, he would have taken as much time as is needed to hear me out. In any case, that was not the situation. He felt that I was not to be trusted as much as I accounted for myself to him. Toward the day's end, I returned home baffled that I had not had the option to pick up tr ust from the chief. I additionally feel that utilization of a few words by the provisions the executives made it difficult for me to convey the message. He asked me for what good reason I had not been astute to counsel him before I went into the premises. The utilization of the words not shrewd went about as a hindrance for me. I felt that the words were inaccurate. I was unable to utilize wrong words to counter the words, yet I needed to impart successfully. Confronted with this, I pulled back a significant part of the data I needed to pass on. Answer for the issue Following the poor correspondence that happened that day, I needed to get another meeting to pass on the message that I intended to on that particular day. For one, I needed to plunk down and evaluate the circumstance in subtleties. The beneficiary had not gotten the message all things considered. I, consequently, decided to do what's needed groundwork for the following meeting. I recorded the primary concerns I needed to pass on and guaranteed that I aced them. Initially, I needed to clarify what my identity was and the past encounters I had with the eatery. I likewise needed to guarantee that the message was brief, yet conveyed all the subtleties of what precisely I needed from the administration. My mentality likewise needed to change. I needed to guarantee that I ought to be prepared to convey, even in where the surprising situations happened. The other factor I needed to consider was the way that the crowd had changed. This implied the language needed to transform; I needed to utilize an alternate methodology this time. I needed to introduce the data such that the provisions the executives could comprehend. It implied that few watchwords must be utilized with the goal that the message would be passed on viably. In the following meeting, correspondence was simple. The input was certain, on account of the certainty I depicted on the gathering. I had the option to utilize right words and was exceptionally quick to guarantee that I was exact. The provisions administrator was fulfilled that I was the perfect individual to keep conveying in their premises. All the more along these lines, I had the option to address all the inquiries that the director posed. I had foreseen a porti on of the inquiries, while some were absolutely sudden. In any case, combined with certainty, I offered very satisfactoory responses. Correspondence requires any offered individual to be exact and exact (Balmud 2008, pp. 48-53). A few subtleties should be maintained a strategic distance from, while others held. This requests enough readiness and evaluation of circumstance within reach. The crowd additionally varies and should be taken care of in an unexpected way. One must consider the specific words to use before conveying to given crowds. For my situation, I was never arranged for an alternate crowd. I didn't have the specific words to move toward the circumstance. The experience that one has had in correspondence may meddle with the capacity of the individual to make successful correspondence in future. This, at that point, calls for mental planning so one can confront the current circumstance in an entire distinctive manner. As far as I can tell, I needed to guarantee that I would get the opportunity to manage the mental issues that the experience made. I needed to guarantee that I was taking a gander at the administration without dread and nervousness. Different hindrances that can happen during correspondence incorporate displeasure, misery among other mental obstructions (Balmud 2008, pp. 47-52). In my circumstance, our correspondence happens in up close and personal channel, and as per this channel I maynt ready to shroud my abrupt responses perhaps outrage by the supervisors selection of words. Recollect Visual and Vocal codes are practically 70% of our correspondence. This would have implied loss of center in the specific data I needed to pass on. I could likewise have utilized inaccurate language and words in the exact instant of outrage and disillusionment. Another situation would have been cliché perspectives from the administration. He could have shaped an off-base supposition on my character, and as such neglect to offer me one more opportunity to impart viably. Every one of these hindrances to correspondence must be tended to. The perspectives must change towards guaranteeing compelling correspondence happens. The commotion levels must be negligible, and, simultaneously, have the right language to guarantee compelling correspondence happens. Successful correspondence is far substantially more significant than all else on the planet. To guarantee that individuals get great criticism each time they are going over any data is vital. It is significant, subsequently, to gain proficiency with the elements of good correspondence. Ensure that individuals will have gotten with joy what others were imparting. I understood that poor correspondence is pricey. I would have very much lost the chance to make business exchanges in future. I needed to beat the obstructions that I was confronted with so correspondence was improved later on. The simpler any individual can conquer the snags, the simpler for them to gain ground in successful correspondence. Purchase custom Transactional Model of Communication exposition

Berkshire Hathaway Company Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Berkshire Hathaway Company - Essay Example The organization is currently a holding organization that holds numerous various auxiliaries. What is the company’s Mission Statement? What is the company’s Vision Statement? Who are the Primary Stakeholders of the organization? Essential partners are the individuals who have an immediate intrigue or stake in the association. The partners of practically all the organizations are same. Partners can influence or be influenced by the activities of a business. The essential partners of Berkshire Hathaway incorporate the proprietor of the organization, the workers, its clients, providers, its leasers, the worker's guilds, its investors and the administration. The workers of Berkshire have an incredible stake in the association since they are straightforwardly connected to the company’s execution (BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY, INC 2010) Similarly the investors share a similar stake in the matter of Berkshire Hathaway. What are the five powers of Competition and how they sway on the organization? The five powers of rivalry present in the earth and that influence the opposition incorporate the contenders of a firm, bartering intensity of providers, haggling intensity of the clients, new participants and the substitutes accessible. Contenders of a firm outcome in competition. ... Berkshire Hathaway has generally excellent relations with its providers. Besides the organization possesses such a significant number of auxiliaries that it has an enormous quantities of providers, hence bringing about a low haggling intensity of the providers. Taking a gander at the clients as a power, they have a high dealing power rather than the providers. Berkshire Hathaway respects its clients every which way. At that point comes the risk of the substitutes. Berkshire has an extremely assorted scope of business exercises and it offers such huge numbers of items to such huge numbers of various markets. There is a danger of substitutes however Berkshire Hathaway has an exceptionally solid monetary and capital position that at whatever point there is an elective speculation accessible in the market, it doesn't stop for a second in getting that other option. Berkshire faces rivalry however the opposition isn't exceptionally gigantic in light of the fact that the quantity of firms p resent in the holding business isn't extremely enormous. There are just not many holding firms that equivalent the size of Berkshire Hathaway. So the opposition is low when contrasted with different enterprises. All the powers of rivalry lead to contention, yet on account of Berkshire these powers are not excessively serious and consequently don't bring about enormous competition. SWOT Analysis SWOT examination is an instrument that is utilized to investigate the qualities and shortcomings of the organization. It assists with deciding the chances and dangers presented by the outside condition. Essentially the investigation sets a heading for the association with respect to how it should utilize its qualities to limit the dangers presented by the outside condition and furthermore to utilize the open doors so as to beat its shortcomings. In spite of the fact that Berkshire Hathaway is settled keeping organization yet at the same time it is beyond the realm of imagination that it wonâ €™t have any shortcomings or

A Woman’s Damnation - Literature Essay Samples

‘The Coquette’ by by Hannah W. Foster is about a young woman, Eliza Wharton, who has an inclination towards coquettish behaviors. The story is a series of letters that warns Eliza about the danger of her life choices, which is primarily a choice between two men, Reverend Boyer and Major Sanford, to court and possibly soon to marry. Both men have very polarized characteristics – the former is a reputable, serious Reverend and the other is openly known as a libertine. Eliza’s life is pressured by the expectations from the women in her life. The main theme revolves around the contemporary American society and the freedom of female choices within a confined selection; anything outside the selection is deemed as morally depriving by society. Eliza’s life is a clash between competing ideas, the vertical versus the horizontal social construct. At the end, Foster justifies the destruction of coquetry through Eliza’s death. ‘The Coquette’ is clearly a cautionary tale. However, there are aspects of the book that critiques the impossible expectation of women by society. The main question Foster poses is that whether the story, to what extent, endorse the prevailing social morality? Foster articulates the expected social morality of a woman through the character of Lucy Freedom. Lucy is Eliza’s main confidante, who also gives and insists Eliza to be a woman that lives up to social expectations. Unlike Eliza, Lucy is not blinded by love, or ‘charmed’ by Sanford’s ‘rhetoric’ (Foster, 36), which makes her voice trustworthy to the reader because she is an outside observer to the three-way love. Many of Lucy’s letters to Eliza shows her urgent denial of her relationship with Sanford – ‘Beware of the delusions of fancy!’, ‘You are strangely infatuated by them’, ‘Let not the magic arts of that worthless Sanford leads you’ (Foster, 51) – the multiple use of exclamation marks shows the urgency of her warning. The dictions ‘delusion’ and ‘infatuated’ show the extreme extent that Eliza is under the bewitchment of Sanford. His flirtation is associate d with ‘magic arts’, implying evil intents. The verb ‘lead’ shows Eliza’s powerlessness as she is incapable of making sane decisions whilst under his spell. Foster wants to associate the freedom of love with the depravity in decorum. Lucy’s defamation of Sanford is also justified by reason: ‘His taste is undebauched, his manners not vitiated’, ‘Major Sanford is certainly destitute’ (Foster, 26). The use of extreme adjectives such as ‘undebauched’ and ‘vitiated’ to amplify his despicable character in the eyes of a feudal society. She acknowledges Sanford’s destitution to point out the importance of financial dependency of a woman on her husband, a key aspect of a vertical, and feudal relationship. Moreover, Lucy cares for the long-term stability of Eliza, not for a love that is caught at first sight: ‘Remember that you are acting for life; and that your happiness in this world, perhaps in the next, depends on your present choice!’ (Foster, 58). This quote clearly shows Lucy’s modernist belief in cause-and-effect and the fact that time travels in a linear, progressive order. Moreover, modernity also believes that one’s social ranking can easily be corrupted if they don’t adhere to the expected social decorum. The dictions ‘next’ and ‘present’ shows the chronology of time. Overall, Lucy urges Eliza to settle a marriage with a well-polished man for her own stability and investment. Foster warns about the manipulation of coquettishness through Sanford’s interaction with Eliza. In their initial encounter, Sanford clearly wants to slyly take advantage of Eliza’s gossiped coquettish behavior with hopes that she would return his attention. Sanford reveals that he ‘shall avenge my sex, by retaliating the mischiefs’, ‘to play off her own artillery, by using unmeaning gallantry’ (Foster, 18). Initially, his ‘unmeaning’ flirts are only to have frivolous short-term ‘mischiefs’. Eliza however sees this first conversation as ‘a conversation perfectly adapted to my taste’. She believes that they both share a common mentality that sparks the glow of first love. This is not true since their conversation is carefully crafted by Sanford to win her heart. Her misunderstanding proves that Eliza’s coquettishness is associated with foolishness, which makes room for sweet yet evil manipulation. Con sequently, their bondage grew to the point where Eliza mistakenly perceives it as ‘affectionate tenderness’ (Foster, 21). It is as though Eliza is a puppet to Sanford’s entertainment. Their meetings nurture into a courtship between the two. When Sanford finds out that she is also courting Boyer at the same time, jealousy erects in him. As a result, he pursues Eliza tirelessly to fulfil his conquest of a lady’s affection and of sexual intercourse, which Eliza mistakes for love. Once Sanford has successfully slept with Eliza, he is overridden with joy. He expresses their sexual intercourse as a ‘full possession of my adorable Eliza’ (Foster, 139). The diction ‘possession’ shows his vertical relationship between man and woman, where the woman is downgraded to the extent of being objectified, or even enslaved. He then reveals that this whole flirtation with Eliza is part of a crafted game: ‘I have never yet been defeated in my plan’ (Foster, 139). ‘Defeated’ shows Sanford’s view that this relationship is like power play between winning and ‘losing’. Sanford is a man of great contradiction in his virtues and intentions which makes his character appalling, he is vertical in marriage due to his destitution, and horizontal in companionship, which allows him to be with two women at once (his wife and Eliza). This makes the reader feel like Eliza is cheated because she is fully horizontal and ex pects the same from Sanford. Sanford’s coquettishness, and the sexist society that allows Sanford to act like this whilst shaming that of Eliza, is the cause of her tragic ending. Her pregnancy outside of marriage makes her unbearable to face society, whilst Sanford is only lightly shamed upon. Overall, the patriarchal society that allows Sanford to behave coquettishly whilst also being intentional evil is certainly out of Eliza’s control, which makes her feel victimized in the novel. This is one of Foster’s rare hints that the novel defames traditional, sexist values and the burden that women carry. However, Eliza’s downfall is also due to her stubborn behavior she does not listen to the warning signs from the women in her life: ‘I am persuaded that his passion for me, was sincere, however deceitful he may have been with others’ (Foster,100). This further justifies the fact that Eliza’s death is caused by her persistence to live upon her coquettish will. These women insist that she becomes a virtuous woman by rejecting coquettish behavior and find happiness in her constrained, domestic lifestyle. Eliza fights the battle between female freedom and social expectations. If she were to marry, she would want to have a balance between a loving companionship and marriage, to bond a relationship with a like-minded man. However, Foster creates the character of Eliza as a warning to say that those who push the boundaries too far are at risk. Her death is an accumulation of all her emotional investment to Sanford, only to find out that she is betrayed by it. Eliza’s death is a self-destruction and it serves as a message to the reader about the perilous consequences of a woman who acts impulsively upon her free will. At her death, she pleads all her regrets in her letter to her mother and her friends. The ending is powerfully constructed because it seems as though Eliza has learned her lesson the hardest and most painful way. In her last letter to her mother, Eliza speaks with the most hurtful of self-blame: ‘Your Eliza has fallen; fallen, indeed!’, ‘She has become the victim of her own indiscretion’ (Foster, 153), she cries that her coquetry is a ‘crime’ of a ‘guilty child’, and she explicitly calls herself a ‘disgrace’ and a ‘ruined child’. The language used is the worst of damnation to the point where there is no virtue left for her to honor. Foster decides to end Eliza’s life with a self-realization because it is a more powerful effect than an unjustified death by murder or by natural cause; it is herself, and her rebellion to status quo that caused her tragedy. The death of the new-born child is symbolic to the novel, although it is hardly mentioned. The child is a product of a short-term passionate love. The child could be a symbol of modernity where relationships are founded by intimacy and of having shared feelings. When Julia finds out about Eliza’s pregnancy, the child (still yet a fetus) is expressed in shame and dishonor. It dies before it was given a chance to live which shows the destructive consequences of a bond of free love. Eliza’s departure is abrupt and known, which further implies that the road to freedom is directionless, and possibly leading to death. Sanford at the end lives in impoverishment, isolation and guilt due to the horrors of Eliza’s death. His realization is reflected through the quote where his corrupted libertine character is a ‘a beacon to warn the American fair of the dangerous tendency’ (Foster 158). The ‘beacon’ is an imagery for a guiding light of morality for young men. He hopes his example will prevent the male egoism to cross such boundaries like what he did. In conclusion, the story of Eliza Wharton is a message that the extent to which a woman can exert her freedom must be controlled because she lives in a vertical world of dependency and obligation, and a world in which having impeccable decorum is expected. This, of course, is a story in contemporary America. The two social constructs – modern and traditional, vertical and horizontal – exist in parallel to the story where Eliza and Sanford exercise the horizontal features whilst the women (except for Eliza), and Boyer are part of the vertical structure. However, ‘The Coquette’ is not fully a cautionary tale, because it does address the sexist society, which allows men to mingle with multiple women and women remain monogamous. Eliza is also faced with impossible expectation – the hardest one is probably to sacrifice her freedom and friendship to a domestic lifestyle once she is married. In my opinion, Eliza is a woman of modernity who is trapped in tra ditional America, however it is her blame that she does not adapt to the social constructs.

The Global Impacts of the Black Death

The Black Death was one of the worst pandemics in human history. In the 14th century, at least 75 million people on three continents perished due to the painful, highly contagious disease. Originating from fleas on rodents in China, the â€Å"Great Pestilence† spread westward and spared few regions. In Europe’s cities, hundreds died daily and their bodies were usually thrown into mass graves. The plague devastated towns, rural communities, families, and religious institutions. Following centuries of a rise in population, the world’s population experienced a catastrophic reduction and would not be replenished for more than one hundred years. Origins and Path of the Black Death Science of the Black Death Types and Symptoms of the Plague Death Toll Estimates of the Black Death Unexpected Economic Benefit of the Black Death Cultural and Social Beliefs and Changes of the Black Death Scourge Spread Across the World The Black Death of the 14th century was a tremendous interrupter of worldwide population growth. The bubonic plague still exists, although it can now be treated with antibiotics. Fleas and their unknowing human carriers traveled across a hemisphere and infected one person after another. Survivors of this swift menace seized the opportunities that arose from altered social and economic structures. Although humanity will never know the exact death toll, researchers will continue to study the epidemiology and history of the plague to ensure that this horror never happens again.

Implementing Differentiated Instruction For Reading Essay

Chapter One The Problem and Its Investigation Reading is an important skill that every child needs to succeed in school. Many students may struggle with learning how to read. Implementing differentiated instruction for reading allows students to learn how to read based on their learning style. Statement of the Problem The purpose of this project is to provide a guide for teachers on implementing differentiated instruction for reading in the second grade classroom. This guide will introduce the process of implementing differentiated instruction for reading. This guide will provide the teachers with strategies they may use when implementing differentiated instruction for reading. The following questions will be investigated: 1. What are the problems students have with learning how to read? 2. What is differentiated instruction and how may it help? 3. What strategies are used in implementing differentiated instruction? Rationale Implementing differentiated instruction for reading in the classroom is important because students have different ways of learning. When implementing differentiated instruction in the classroom, it is a way of meeting the individual needs of the students. When the teacher use few methods of teaching how to read, then not all types of learners will gain that knowledge. The steps of implementing differentiated instruction for reading in your classroom may be challenging for many teachers. Assumptions and Limitations The followingShow MoreRelatedDifferentiated instruction is matching instruction to meet the different needs of the diverse1200 Words   |  5 PagesDifferentiated instruction is matching instruction to meet the different needs of the diverse learners in their learning environment. Most learning environments are structured to operate under the principles that learners must demonstrate and perform to a certain level, which is specified, by whatever mandating entity the learners are either employed by or learning within. This entity sets the standard that will signify achieved learning or academic growth. Therefore it is important as an instructionalRead MoreTeaching Students With A Wide Array Of Abilities1718 Words   |  7 Pagesabilities can greatly differ from students practicing in below grade level work to above grade level work. For instance, in a third grade class made of 26 children, you will find that their reading abilities differ immensely in l evel. One of your students may be reading at a kindergarten level, while another is reading beyond a fifth grade level. In cases such as these, the teacher needs to find ways to adapt lesson plans to meet the learning abilities of both these students, while also adapting to theRead MoreThe Curriculum : Differentiated Curriculum Essay1554 Words   |  7 PagesDifferentiated Curriculum Classrooms today look very different than they did twenty years ago. Gone are the days of students sitting at their desks, copying notes as the teacher writes on the chalkboard. Children are entering kindergarten at varying levels of abilities and the gap between student aptitudes grows as children get older. Students with learning disabilities are mainstreamed into classrooms and, with the growing number of immigrant families, teachers are faced with students who doRead MoreDifferentiated Instruction Essay1626 Words   |  7 PagesIn today’s educational environment, all students expect to receive the same level of instruction from schools and all students must meet the same set of standards. Expectations for students with learning disabilities are the same as students without any learning difficulties. It is now unacceptable for schools or teachers to expect less from one segment of students because they have physical disabilities, learning disabilities, discipline probl ems, or come from poor backgrounds. Standardize testingRead MoreClassrooms Today Look Very Different Than Students Essay1572 Words   |  7 Pages My school serves over 1,800 students in grades sixth through eighth. There are ninety-two teachers, a reading coach, an instructional resource specialist, a testing coordinator, an Exceptional Student Education (ESE) staffing specialist, two ESE support persons, one Paraprofessional and one media specialist. The administrative staff consists of two Deans, an Assistant Principal of Instruction, an Assistant Principal of Operations and a Principal. In addition, there are four guidance counselors.Read MoreEssay on Resources for Differentiated Instruction639 Words   |  3 PagesIntroduction As described by Hall, Strangman, Meyer (2011), differentiated instruction [DI] allows teachers to build flexibility into their approach and understanding in adapting curriculum to the needs of the student, instead of requiring students to apply modifications they may be ill-equipped to complete (p. 2). In the alternative classroom, with a majority of students ELLs, teachers can adapt DI to set lesson and curriculum goals through a range of instructional and management strategies toRead MorePros and Cons of Differentiated Instruction1373 Words   |  6 Pagesthese tips help take away some of your stress! Pros and Cons of Differentiated Instruction Pros of Differentiated Instruction Differentiated instruction is a way of thinking about teaching and learning. It means using a variety of instructional strategies that address diverse student learning needs. It places students at the center of teaching and learning and student needs drive instructional planning. Differentiated learning is a way to enhance learning for all students by engagingRead MoreDifferentiated Learning Research Paper. John R. Hamilton.1225 Words   |  5 Pages Differentiated Learning Research Paper John R. Hamilton Providence College Differentiated Learning Research Paper Throughout this paper, four articles about differentiated instruction will be analyzed, and the information in those articles will be broken down and synthesized to further exemplify how important it is that schools across the world use this system of instruction and learning. My definition of differentiated instruction from what I have learned, isRead MoreEssay on Differentiated Instruction: Optimizing Student Success 1257 Words   |  6 PagesIntroduction Differentiated Instruction is a succeeding teaching style; teachers instruct according to a system that a student will get the best results. Neurologically everyone learns in a different way. A teacher’s objective is to guarantee that maximum potential from every pupil is reached. Teaching adolescent students is a vital time period to assure that they reach understandings and discover the way that they learn best, because this is ordinarily the peak of their neurological developmentRead MoreDifferent Types Of Instructions For An Effective Teacher1031 Words   |  5 Pageschoosing the appropriate forms of instruction and the different types of instructions that are most commonly used to be an effective teacher. In EDEL 441, I learned the difference in direct instruction and indirection instruction. Indirect instruction allows students to reach the higher levels of learning because it is student centered. Students build on their own knowledge while they observe, investigat e, infer, and form a hypothesis. In contrast, direct instruction is teacher centered meaning the

Collective Soul - Better Now free essay sample

I particularly enjoy listening to Collective Soul. They are a nice Clean band that talk about random things. I get sick of all the Romace songs, so it is nice that most of their songs, are not love related. Of course love is a wonderful thing, but It can get annoying to only listen to songs about love, and people breaking up. This Particular song: Better Now is one of my favorite Collective Soul songs. This song (and the cursed mix) have a great toon. It makes you fell good. You want to go out and be active. It is not a heavy song, so it doesnt boost your adrenaline, but it makes you fell happy. It is like an alternate adrenaline. In this song it has some creative word choices. One part of the song says, Oh Im happy as Christmas, All rapped to be seen. Although that is creative and clever, I think it sounds kinda lame, but maybe thats just me. We will write a custom essay sample on Collective Soul Better Now or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page I am not saying that I dislike this song whatsoever, because I think that It is a great song, and you should listen to it.

Reconciling Desire free essay sample

A look at how the literary world has addressed the issue of mans struggle with personal desire. This paper examines the issue of desire and how man approaches the struggle when individual desires come into conflict with what society judges to be appropriate. The works of Swift, More, and Chaucer are explored. The question of human desire, no matter how that desire may manifest itself, has long been an intellectual and emotional stumbling block for society, politics, culture, and religion. Throughout history, individuals have had to learn how to reconcile their personal desires inside larger social institutions institutions that for their part have very often come to challenge or undermine the legitimacy of human desire. More often than not, individuals have had to find ways to suppress their desires given that they somehow come into conflict with more acceptable, social standards. Literature, though, in fact, this might be a common theme in most all forms of art, at one time or another has reflected this on-going, archetypal struggle. We will write a custom essay sample on Reconciling Desire or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page

Europe and the American Revolutionary War

Europe and the American Revolutionary War Fought between 1775 and 1783, the American Revolutionary War, otherwise known as the American War of Independence was primarily a conflict between the British Empire and some of its American colonists, who triumphed and created a new nation: the United States of America. France played a vital role in aiding the colonists, but accrued great debt in doing so, partly causing the French Revolution. Causes of the American Revolution Britain may have triumphed in the French and Indian War of 1754–1763, which was fought in North America on behalf of Anglo-American colonists but it had spent considerable sums to do so. The British government decided that the colonies of North America should contribute more to its defense and raised taxes. Some colonists were unhappy with this - merchants among them were especially upset - and British heavy-handedness exacerbated a belief that the British weren’t allowing them enough rights in return, even though some colonists had no problems owning slaves. This situation was summed up in the revolutionary slogan â€Å"No Taxation without Representation.† Colonists were also unhappy that Britain was preventing them from expanding further out into America, partly as a result of agreements with Native Americans agreed after the Pontiac rebellion of 1763–4, and the Quebec Act of 1774, which expanded Quebec to cover vast areas of what is now the USA. The lat ter allowed French Catholics to retain their language and religion, further angering the predominantly Protestant colonists. Tensions rose between the two sides, fanned by expert colonial propagandists and politicians, and finding expression in mob violence and brutal attacks by rebel colonists. Two sides developed: pro-British loyalists and anti-British ‘patriots’. In December 1773, citizens in Boston dumped a consignment of tea into a harbor in protest of taxes. The British responded by closing down Boston Harbour and imposing limits on civilian life. As a result, all but one of the colonies gathered in the ‘First Continental Congress’ in 1774, promoting a boycott of British goods. Provincial congresses formed, and the militia was raised for war. 1775: The Powder Keg Explodes On April 19th, 1775 the British governor of Massachusetts sent a small group of troops to confiscate powder and arms from colonial militiamen, and also arrest ‘troublemakers’ who were agitating for war. However, the militia was given notice in the form of Paul Revere and other riders and was able to prepare. When the two sides met in Lexington someone, unknown, fired, initiating a battle. The ensuing Battles of Lexington, Concord and after saw the militia - crucially including large numbers of Seven Year War veterans - harass the British troops back to their base in Boston. The war had begun, and more militia gathered outside Boston. When the Second Continental Congress met there was still hope of peace, and they weren’t yet convinced about declaring independence, but they named George Washington, who had happened to be present at the start of the French Indian war, as leader of their forces. Believing that militias alone would not be enough, he started to raise a Continental Army. After a hard fought battle at Bunker Hill, the British could not break the militia or the siege of Boston, and King George III declared the colonies in rebellion; in reality, they had been for some time. Two Sides, Not Clearly Defined This wasn’t a clear-cut war between the British and the American colonists. Between a fifth and a third of the colonists supported Britain and remained loyal, while it’s estimated another third remained neutral where possible. As such it has been called a civil war; at the close of the war, eighty thousand colonists loyal to Britain fled from the US. Both sides had experienced veterans of the French Indian war among their soldiers, including major players like Washington. Throughout the war, both sides used militia, standing troops and ‘irregulars’. By 1779 Britain had 7000 loyalists under arms. (Mackesy, The War for America, p. 255) War Swings Back and Forth A rebel attack on Canada was defeated. The British pulled out of Boston by March 1776 and then prepared for an attack on New York; on July 4th, 1776 the thirteen colonies declared their independence as the United States of America. The British plan was to make a swift counterstrike with their army, isolating perceived key rebel areas, and then use a naval blockade to force the Americans to come to terms before Britain’s European rivals joined the Americans. British troops landed that September, defeating Washington and pushing his army back, allowing the British to take New York. However, Washington was able to rally his forces and win at Trenton, where he defeated German troops working for Britain, keeping morale up among the rebels and damaging loyalist support. The naval blockade failed because of overstretching, allowing valuable supplies of arms to get into the US and keep the war alive. At this point, the British military had failed to destroy the Continental Army and ap peared to have lost every valid lesson of the French and Indian War. The British then pulled out of New Jersey, alienating their loyalists, and moved to Pennsylvania, where they won a victory at Brandywine, allowing them to take the colonial capital of Philadelphia. They defeated Washington again. However, they didn’t pursue their advantage effectively and the loss of the US capital was small. At the same time, British troops tried to advance down from Canada, but Burgoyne and his army were cut off, outnumbered, and forced to surrender at Saratoga, thanks in part to Burgoyne’s pride, arrogance, desire for success, and resulting poor judgment, as well as the failure of British commanders to co-operate. The International Phase Saratoga was only a small victory, but it had a major consequence: France seized upon the chance to damage her great imperial rival and moved from secret support for the rebels to overt help, and for the rest of the war they sent crucial supplies, troops, and naval support. Now Britain couldn’t focus entirely on the war as France threatened them from around the world; indeed, France became the priority target and Britain seriously considered pulling out of the new US entirely to focus on its European rival. This was now a world war, and while Britain saw the French islands of the West Indies as a viable replacement for the thirteen colonies, they had to balance their limited army and navy over many areas. Caribbean islands soon changed hands between the Europeans. The British then pulled out of advantageous positions on the Hudson River to reinforce Pennsylvania. Washington had his army and forced it through training while camped for the harsh winter. With the aims of the British in America scaled right back, Clinton, the new British commander, withdrew from Philadelphia and based himself in New York. Britain offered the US a joint sovereignty under a common king but were rebuffed. The King then made it clear he wanted to try and retain the thirteen colonies and feared that US independence would lead to the loss of the West Indies (something Spain also feared), to which troops were sent from the US theater. The British moved the emphasis to the south, believing it to be full of loyalists thanks to information from refugees and trying for piecemeal conquest. But the loyalists had risen before the British arrived, and there was now little explicit support; brutality flowed from both sides in a civil war. British victories at Charleston under Clinton and Cornwallis at Camden were followed by loyalist defeats. Cornwallis continued to win victories, but tenacious rebel commanders prevented the British from achieving success. Orders from the north now forced Cornwallis to base himself at Yorktown, ready for resupply by sea. Victory and Peace A combined Franco-American army under Washington and Rochambeau decided to shift their troops down from the north with the hope of cutting Cornwallis off before he moved. French naval power then fought a draw at the Battle of Chesapeake - arguably the key battle of the war - pushing the British navy and vital supplies away from Cornwallis, ending any hope of immediate relief. Washington and Rochambeau besieged the city, forcing Cornwallis’ surrender. This was the last major action of the war in America, as not only was Britain faced with a worldwide struggle against France, but Spain and Holland had joined. Their combined shipping could compete with the British navy, and a further ‘League of Armed Neutrality’ was harming British shipping. Land and sea battles were fought in the Mediterranean, the West Indies, India and West Africa, and an invasion of Britain was threatened,  leading to panic. Furthermore, over 3000 British merchant ships had been captured (Marston, American War of Independence, 81). The British still had troops in America and could send more, but their will to continue was sapped by a global conflict, the massive cost both of fighting the war - the National Debt had doubled - and reduced trade income, along with a lack of explicitly loyal colonists, led to the resignation of a Prime Minister and the opening of peace negotiations. These produced the Treaty of Paris, signed on September 3rd, 1783, with the British recognizing the thirteen former colonies as independent, as well as settling other territorial issues. Britain had to sign treaties with France, Spain and the Dutch. Aftermath For France, the war incurred massive debt, which helped push it into revolution, bring down the king, and start a new war. In America, a new nation had been created, but it would take a civil war for ideas of representation and freedom to become a reality. Britain had relatively few losses aside from the US, and the focus of empire switched to India. Britain resumed trading with the Americas and now saw their empire as more than simply a trading resource, but a political system with rights and responsibilities. Historians like Hibbert argue that the aristocratic class which had led the war was now deeply undermined, and power began to transform into a middle class. (Hibbert, Redcoats and Rebels, p.338).

Against Capital Punishment Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Against Capital Punishment - Research Paper Example The whole purpose of criminal justice system is to rehabilitate criminals but capital punishment defeats this very purpose. Killing a criminal means that state believes there is no chance a criminal can improve. Capital punishment therefore should not be permissible because it is not found to be effective, can result in killing of an innocent person and defeats the concept of rehabilitation. Studies have proved that crime rate does not decrease as a result of administration of capital punishment. A comparison between two states of similar culture and crime rate has shown that execution does not deter crime (Zimring, Fagan, & Johnson 2009). This comparison was made between two states, one with capital punishment law and other without it. This clearly shows that killing a person does not produce the widely argued ‘deterrence’ effect. Killing a person cannot decrease crime rate and therefore the main argument that is made in favor of capital punishment is rejected. There are many other motivators of crimes therefore death punishment alone cannot reduce crime rates significantly. A criminal is not thinking rationally when he or she commits a crime therefore it is impossible to stop criminal behavior just by the threat of capital punishment. The argument of deterrence can also work if capital punishment is prohibited. A lifelong sentence in prison can also deter a criminal so there is no need for capital punishment. Sometimes capital punishment is not justified for certain types of criminals. For example serial killers and serial rappers should be forced to live all their life in confinement. This should be more appropriate for them as killing them at once will only end their life but lifelong confinement will hurt them daily. The concept of retribution, therefore, can also be well served by abolishing capital punishment. Research has also suggested that bad prison conditions

Health promotion in Hong Kong Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2750 words

Health promotion in Hong Kong - Essay Example ealth Service of the Department of Health (DH), the obesity rate among primary school students increased from 16.4% in 1997-98 to 21.3% in 2007-08.  Recent study states that 20.3% of the boys and 10.1% of the girls are overweight at 10 years of age and about half of this figure is noticed among the 15-year-old (10.3% boys, 6.3% girls). To encourage healthy eating habit, DH has made arrangements so that public awareness with regard to the vitality of healthy eating can be increased. Obesity is now a global problem. There is now consensus on the negative impact of obesity on physical, mental and social functions in children (Swallen KC, et all, 2004 and Reilly JJ, Wilson D, 2006). What is more, majority of the obese children stay obese in their adulthood also (Vanhala M, 1998), resulting in potential augmented hazard of adult mortality and morbidity (Rudolf MC, 2001), (Burke V, 2005) and (Karnehed N, et al, 2007). Community need appraisal was conducted before the project was instituted. Clear pictures of health issue, identification of the problems and directions for intervention were undertaken. Obesity is the foremost public health scourge worldwide in children and adults [(Flegal KM, et all, 2002), (Hedley AA, et all, 2002), (Ogden CL et al, 2002), (Sharma M, 2007)]. The occurrence and brutality of childhood obesity is considerably raising with a consequent augment in the frequency of obesity-related unwholesomeness especially those linking to obstructive sleep apnea and metabolic and cardiovascular sequelae (Tauman R, Gozal D, 2006). Avoidance of childhood obesity is a critical concern for public health in several industrialized countries and some changeover societies. Nutrition and physical activity (PA) has been the most vital study focused on obesity prevention. But the issued findings of such treatments recommended little achievement in keeping away childhood obesity (Nestle M, Jacobson & MF. Halting, 2000). Some studies also focused on dietary or/and PA

Career Path for Acounting Essay Example for Free

Career Path for Acounting Essay It is always so hard to give the exact number of people who have majored in accounting, but one thing that I know is that the demography is very wide and large. This is because they have different reasons for majoring in this career path. The most common reason to all people is because accounting is a marketable career and they merely want to find a job. The number of people majoring in this field is growing immensely and the most important thing is to consider the main reason of joining this profession. Some people will claim that when they were in high school, this was their best subject and they loved it and so they will need to major in it. I believe the best reason for majoring in accounting is because it has wide varieties of career path that one can major in. People should understand that this field is not all about debits and credits. It is more of a communicating language in the world of business and this is why many chief executive officers hold a degree in this field. In the day today life it is usually one of the most common undergraduate degree programs. The most important thing is to make certain that all of the people who are in this profession understand business and that is why many people who have ventured in accounting always have considerations for such posts. The most interesting part of this career choice is that most of the time the people who venture into it will always have the best job positions waiting for them because many people always have a notion that it is a difficult discipline. The employment opportunities are abounding for the graduates majoring in accounting. The government figures shows that at least 1.2 million of jobs are held by accountants every year. According to the Feldmann, 2009 and also the survey done by the Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA, 2000) the graduates are declining but after revisiting their research in the year 2005, it reflected an increase in number of the accountant graduates. This has become a relief to many accounting recruiters. According to the 2007 Employment dynamics and growth expectations (EDGE) 57% of the hiring managers have a difficulty when hiring qualified staff. This call for a necessity of accounting graduates, which fortunately is increasing day after the other as the business enterprises increase. After attaining a degree in this sector, most of the students always opt to become public accountants as the first career choice. The choice of either taking job as a private accountant depended on the fact that they had to make choices among the salary values offered to them. None of them like to work in the non profit organizations. They also venture to work in a CPA company because this will give them an opportunity to venture in areas that they want to experience especially in the write up sector and auditing. This will offer them the necessary experience and that is one of the things that have invigorated so many students in venturing in the public sector option. One may also opt to venture in the private sector which is immensely lucrative. Some of the student will always like to work for the company which is rising up in this sector, but this will be determined by the level of research one is willing to do. This will give them a chance to grow and nurture their career paths in different sectors. I would advise the graduates to incline towards the public sector especially the government and non profitable sector which will provide them with the best job security even if the salary is low. There are several things that an accountant can do after they have completed their undergraduate degree. One can choose to specialize in different areas of this field, but most of all have the kind of skills that can enable them in doing so. One of the areas that is very common for people who have done accounting. Auditing is one of the areas that one can venture in. It is one of the basic areas that people have chosen to build their careers in. This kind of job involves checking of ledgers and financial statements for an organization so as to determine if they are making losses and are they spending the cash that has been allocated to them accordingly. In the era that we are in today, the work of this nature has been automated and mostly they just need to key in the values accordingly and they are going to get the right kind of statement. They ensure that the values that are presented are for the financial year contains the right values. Accounting career paths are very varied and this is why many a times one has to consider the path that they want take. Many people after they have cleared school do not have an impression where to flinch their careers but the many options have in these career paths that can be taken. Book keeping is another thing that they can do. These are the people who keep records of invoices, payments and other revenue coming for a company or an individual. In many cases they will always want to venture in this area accordingly. Another area, which they would venture in is becoming general accountants. This is almost the same to a book keeper, but they make accruals and the necessary adjustments in the accounting records. In the large organizations, they are usually placed in departments like human resources department dealing with the payment of the staff. Another area is when one becomes a controller. These are the people who are responsible for the accounting department. They usually work in the public sector but also venture in the private sector and they are usually in charge of cash flow for the organization. For one to reach to such a position, one must work and put a lot of determination in the work that they do. The other job, which is available for them is becoming a forensic accountant. These are the people who work with the government or the persons who are accountable for auditing and investigating crimes which are related to accounting frauds and other related things. These people should ensure that they posses some level of law knowledge because this will assist them in identifying areas which have been altered and assist in prosecution of the culprits. A budget analyst is another thing that they can do. This is because they are able to interpret many things, which are recorded in the budget. This is a very crucial and involving work because they are the people who are responsible in the making of financial plans for businesses and other organizations especially the government agencies and other non profitable organizations. The professionals who have taken up these works can take up these jobs in both the private and the public sectors. The people who take these kinds of jobs should be very innovative when it comes to the negotiation process and that is why they should have good personal and interpersonal skills. Financial accounting is another sector that one can venture in. These are the persons who are accountable for the preparation of financial statements of the available businesses or any enterprise. These are the persons who are used to make decisions when there is a merger which is going to take place in any company. This is because these people Are gifted to study the fiscal statements of the two companies and determine if there is a need for merger and if one of the companies is taking advantage of the other or not. They are also responsible for forecasting to determine the returns that will be experienced by the companies when they merge. It is important to make sure that these people are responsible for the financial and accounting processes. Management accounting is a very busy position in any organization. This is why many people are able to have the kind of decisions that are deterministic in the process of capital budgeting and the area of analysis of contracts. Control on businesses on the expenses and the cost analysis is done by these people. They usually make sure that they work in close contact with the people responsible for the marketing sector since they assist in a big way when it comes to the making decisions which are good for the welfare of the company. Taxation is another area which they can take up. This is for persons who would like to become tax accountants. These are the people who work for both companies and individuals. They usually prepare statements which either for a corporation of personal income. It is a boost for the individual who is doing this kind of work to have good knowledge background of the necessary kind of economics which is being used by these people. Accountants are also responsible for advising individuals when it comes to venturing in different kinds of businesses. This is because they are the people who have the knowhow on the issues that are present and current in the business world. It is very good to ensure that the people who need services can be given independent and privately. Budgeting and other issues, which are associated with the business are given and offered to the people accordingly. This is very usual for the companies which need a lot of desecrate business especially those that are being faces with of competition. They need individuals who are trustworthy and can be able to keep a secret and the customer’s information private. Some individuals have also opted to continue with their studies even after becoming qualified accountants. They continue for MS to become licensed, Certified Public Accountants. This is a person who is approved by the state to finance financial information in the public companies to give accurate results. These are the individuals qualified to start their own auditing firms if they do not a favouring or well paying job opportunity (Felix 2010, 56). Thus the study found it advisable for the accountant graduates to continue to this level for better and higher chances of employment opportunities and also private or self employment enterprises. The study realized various career choices coincide with the accountant career path. Though the rate of accountant graduate seems to increase year after the other, the job opportunities are also increasing since many people are venturing to businesses which requires accountants to deal with the financial analysis. Each and every sector starting with the individual enterprises, the public, private and nongovernmental organizations cannot be successful without the accountants. These are important personnel since every business is after making profits and thus accounting careers like the auditing department are important to examine whether the business profitable or not. The private and public sectors also requires accountant staffs that are qualified to analyze their financial status and thus, realizing on the areas that needs improvement. Some students lack the opportunity of joining any of the discussed careers especially because of some issues like corruption and high competition. Nevertheless such students are not supposed to be frustrated but to come up with other activities that utilize their qualifications. A number of graduates who have lacked a position in the public, private, or the non profit organizations have started their own auditing firms. They run their own business as private auditors and are employed casually by these organizations. Other graduates have set their small microfinance businesses. These are industries which are growing at a high rate. For the qualified accountants their operations are easy and beneficial. These enterprises have become common in the rural areas and in areas with small scale business. Some of the accountants are joining hands to operate such businesses as partners. Some of these enterprises have grown to become Sacco’s and eventually banks. continue for MS to become licensed, Certified Public Accountants. This is an individual who is licensed by the state to finance financial information in the public companie s to give accurate results. These are the individuals qualified to start their own auditing firms if they do not a favouring or well paying job opportunity (Felix 2010, 56). Thus the study found it advisable for the accountant graduates to continue to this level for better and higher chances of employment opportunities and also private or self employment enterprises. For people who have advanced in these areas and actually had the best payment package compared to having a degree alone. This is why I would advice many people to make sure that they have taken the issue of taking CPA in an extra way to be able to make more money and have better jobs. Many people who have licences and certifications are able to have the best things in the career paths toward getting the best jobs possible. Every qualified accountant expects a salary that is higher than for any other undergraduate from a number of business schools. There is also an expectation of initiation into an exclusive professional club of the practicing accountants. This is a symbolic status that makes one feel to have an important and recognized rank in the society. Unfortunately these expectations are rarely met in the current society. Quite a number of students have joined the account career. This is making this field to have more than the required participants. In other words the supply is overtaking the demand. With high expectations of having a unique status, what happens when one fails to achieve this goal? One is also interested with the queries like where an accountant career path can lead one to or if there are there other industrial areas related to accountant career that such a graduate could get involved to utilize his knowledge. For students who are clearing from the universities i would advise that one who is trying to learn about a good accounting career path should have a wide variety of choices especially if he has a degree in accounting. One’s initial selection depends on the feeling about a primary direction that he believes is of interest to him. There are various general areas where one can choose to work in for instance private, public, government linked, or the non profit making organizations. For newer graduates, it is advisable to work with a CPA firm since it gives an opportunity to examine a number of industries and experience of both the audit and write up functions. One may also decide to join a private sector which is more beneficial, nevertheless it is advisable to first investigate on any industry that lies as a choice and go for the one that is fast growing. This gives an opportunity for expansion of ones career and thus wider rooms for advancement. Where one is inclined in a public service or a career in a government or non profit making organizations, one gets a good chance of exploring in various issues and can easily make changes which are beneficial to a the whole society or even the nation. All the government offices, in all departments, require accountant personnel that are talented. These offices include the FDIC, IRS, Comptroller of the currency, General services administration, military branches departments, health ministries, environmental ministries, to mention but a few. Any accounting working area, be it in government, public, or private sectors, will always lead to an interesting financial rewarding and beneficial careers. Though some of these careers overlap they vary in focus and lead to a challenging, professional life. In conclusion I would say that Accounting is a career that moulds accountants; these are persons that are responsible in the provision of data that is mainly required to make an assessment on the future and current economic activities. Accountants performs various duties, which include planning tax strategy, calculating the computing cost, preparation of financial statements, developing information technology, measuring financial performance, to mention but a few. This suggests that there are various and different accounting career paths which are beneficial in one way or another and can fit different people. Though some of them overlap, each of them has a specific focus. For successful career people should be able to do the best that they can do to advance this sector. Many technological advances have been made to ensure that these people who take up this course are able to save time and actually do their work better too.

Outsourcing of America Essay -- Ethics Employment Economics Essays

Outsourcing of America In an increasingly globalize society, it is nothing new to hear about product development and assembly going abroad. Factory jobs have been moved to other nations for decades, and more recently, customer call centers are being relocated to foreign nations. With the current downturn in the economy, people are looking to at this situation in an increasingly negative way. Not all work that moved abroad ended in satisfaction, yet the trend appears to be spreading to new jobs and industries. With the growing population of college educated in foreign nations, software development jobs are shipping overseas. With many incentives associated with outsourcing to various countries versus keeping jobs in the country, companies are laying-off employees and closing down offices. We will discuss the effects that this trend has on people here in the United States, its effect on people in the foreign nations, and explore the ethics behind the shifting jobs to other nations. A Look at Outsourcing Outsourcing is a growing trend, but the term can encompass many development strategies. Software outsourcing is: 1.) the contracting (or subcontracting) with an external organization for the development of complete or partial software products, 2.) the purchase of packaged or customized package software products, or 3.) activities to aid in the software development life cycle[1]. The efforts that are not outsourced are called in-house efforts. In-house efforts ate those efforts that are completely developed within the customer organization. Many organizations have information technology (IT), prototyping, applications, or otherwise-names departments responsible for in-house applications development. Introducing a littl... ...outsourcing. [1] Brian G Herman, â€Å"A Decision Support tool to Categorize the Applicability of Outsourcing Strategies to Specific Software Development Projects and Goals,† diss., Arizona State University, 1999, pg.2 [2] Herman, pg 2-6 [3] Herman pg .7 [4] Herman pg 13 [5] Jyoti Thottam, â€Å"Is Your Job Going Abroad?,† Time, March 1,2004, 6 [6] Jaikumar Vijayan, â€Å"India Inc., Still Going Strong : Other countries are nipping at its heels, but India remains the premier offshore destination,† ComputerWorld, September 2003 [7] Thottam [8] Vijayan [9] Stacy Collett, â€Å"Singapore: Small but powerful, † ComputerWorld, September 2003 [10] Alan S. Horowitz, â€Å"Canada: Safe, secure and 'near-shore' : It's the safe 'near-shore' option, though it's a little pricey,† ComputerWorld, September 2003 [11] Thottam [12] Thottam [13] Thottam [14] Thottam

Is Competition Good

Review of Industrial Organization 19: 37–48, 2001.  © 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. 37 Is Competition Such a Good Thing? Static Ef? ciency versus Dynamic Ef? ciency MARK BLAUG University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Abstract. This paper addresses the rationale for antitrust legislation. It is a striking fact that the legitimacy of antitrust law has been taken for granted in the United States ever since the Sherman Act of 1890 and, until the advent of the so-called Chicago School, it was even taken for granted by conservative American economists. Europeans, on the other hand, have always been lukewarm about legal action against trusts and cartels and this attitude is found right across the political spectrum in most European countries. Nevertheless, in both the U. S. A. and Europe, the ultimate justi? cation for antitrust law derives from economic doctrine regarding the bene? cial effects of competition. But what exactly are these bene? cial effects and how secure is the contention of economists that competition is always superior to monopoly? Surprisingly enough, competition, that central concept of economics, is widely misunderstood by many economists, both as a market phenomenon and as an organizing principle of economic reasoning. I. A Little History of Thought I begin by drawing what I believe is a fundamental distinction in the history of economics, as far back as Adam Smith or even William Petty, between two different notions of what is meant by competition, namely, competition as an end-state of rest in the rivalry between buyers and sellers and competition as a process of rivalry that may or may not terminate in an end-state. In the end-state conception of equilibrium, the focus of attention is on the nature of the equilibrium state in which the contest between transacting agents is ? nally resolved; if there is recognition of change at all, it is change in the sense of a new stationary equilibrium of endogenous variables in response to an altered set of exogenous variables; but comparative statics is still an end-state conception of economics. However, in the process conception of competition, what is in the foreground of analysis is not the existence of equilibrium, but rather the stability of that equilibrium state. How do markets adjust when one equilibrium is displaced by another and at what speed will these markets converge to a new equilibrium? But, surely, all theories of competition do both; existence and stability are tied up together and to study one is to study the other? By no means, however; it is easy to show that, for centuries, competition to economists meant an active process of jockeying for advantage, tending towards, but never actually culminating in, an 38 MARK BLAUG equilibrium end-state. Only in 1838, in Cournot’s Mathematical Principles of the Theory of Wealth was the process conception of competition totally displaced by the end-state conception of market-clearing equilibria. At ? rst this did not succeed in wiping the slate entirely clean of an interest in competitive processes but in the decade of the 1930s – those years of high theory as George Shackle called them – the Monopolistic Competition Revolution and the Hicks-Samuelson rehabilitation of Walrasian general equilibrium theory, forti? d by the New Welfare Economies, succeeded in enthroning the end-state conception of competition and enthroning it so decisively that the process view of competition was virtually buried out of sight. Let me elaborate. It is a striking feature of the language of The Wealth of Nations that the term â€Å"competition† invariably appears with a de? nite or inde? nite article preceding it: â€Å"a competition between capitals†; â€Å"the competi tion with private traders†, and so forth. For Smith, competition is not a state or situation, as it is for Cournot and for us, but a behavioural activity; it is a race – the original sense of the verb â€Å"to compete† – between two or more individuals to dispose of excess supply or to obtain goods available in limited quantities. What we nowadays call competition or the market mechanism was for him â€Å"the obvious and simple system of natural liberty†, meaning no more than an absence of restraints or ree entry into industries and occupations. Neither competition nor monopoly was a matter of the number of sellers in a market; monopoly did not mean a single seller but a situation of less than perfect factor mobility and hence inelastic supply; and the opposite of competition, was not monopoly, but co-operation. Producers in The Wealth of Nations treat price as a variable in accordance with the buoyancy of their sales, much like enterprises in modern theories of imperfect competition. This was not a conception invented by Smith because by 1776, competition had long been analyzed by a whole series of eighteenth century authors as a process which brings temporary â€Å"market† prices into line with cost-covering natural prices, those â€Å"natural† prices were indeed â€Å"the central price, to which the prices of all commodities are continually gravitating†, and in saying that Smith invoked Newtonian language to dignify a conception of price-determination that had a long tradition going back to the seventeenth century. To obtain that end-state in which market prices equal natural prices and the rate of pro? is equalized between industries, there had to be a considerable number of rivals, possessing common knowledge of market opportunities; they had to be free to enter and exit different lines of investment; but that was all and even that much was never spelled out explicitly as necessary prerequisites for competition – only once did Smit h ever mention the number of rival ? rms involved in competition. It was Cournot who ? rst had the notion of sellers facing a horizontal demand curve when their numbers become so large that none can in? uence the price of their own product. Competition, which once meant the way in which ? rms take account of how their rivals respond to their actions, now meant little more than the slope of the average revenue curve depriving ? rms in the limit of any power to make the price. Thus was born, decades before the Marginal Revolution of the 1870s what IS COMPETITION SUCH A GOOD THING? 39 one writer has wittily called â€Å"the quantity theory of competition† (quoted in Blaug, 1997, p. 68). Edgeworth’s Mathematical Psychics (1981) followed Cournot in providing all the trappings of the modern de? nition of perfect ompetition in terms of a large number of sellers, a homogeneous product, perfect mobility of resources and perfect knowledge on the part of buyers and sellers of all alternative opportunities. However, Marshall’s treatment of the competition always carefully labelled as â€Å"free competition† was much closer to Smith’s â€Å"simple system of natural liberty† than to that of C ournot and Edgeworth’s perfect competition. Even Walras hesitated to follow Cournot to the letter. Indeed, it was not until the 1920’s that the modern textbook concept of perfect competition was ? ally received into the corpus of mainstream economics, largely due to the impact of Knight’s classic, Risk, Uncertainty and Pro? t (1921). But it is doubtful whether the idea was in fact fully accepted in 1921 and a good case can be made for the thesis that it was Robinson and Chamberlain a decade later who hammered down the theory of perfect competition in the very process of inventing imperfect and monopolistic competition theory (Machovec, 1995). The replacement of the process conception of competition by an end-state conception, which was ? alized in 1933 or thereabouts, drained the idea of competition of all behavioural content, so that even price competition, the very kernel, of the competitive process for Adam Smith, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill now had to be analysed as â€Å"imperfect† competition, a sort of deviation from the norm. Indeed, every act of competition on the part of a businessman was now taken as evidence of some degree of monopoly power, and hence a departure from the ideal of perfect competition, and yet pure monopoly ruled out competitive behaviour as much as did perfect competition. II. Perfect Competition, the Unattainable Ideal All I have said so far merely reiterates what Schumpeter said in 1942 and Hayek repeated in 1949: â€Å"perfect competition is not only impossible but inferior, and has no title to being set up as a model of ideal ef? ciency†; â€Å"what the theory of perfect competition discusses has little claim to be called ’competition’ at all and its conclusions are of little use as guides to policy† (quoted in Blaug, 1997, p. 69). But this message, delivered over a half-century ago, fell on deaf ears and the endstate theory of perfect competition is more ? mly in the saddle today than it ever was in the 1940s when Hayek and Schumpeter, not to mention John Maurice Clark (1949, 1961), were writing. And why? The answer is simple: it is that most of us were taught that although perfect competition is rarely if ever attained, nearly-perfect competition is said to be observable in some markets (agricultural markets being a favour ite example) and these approximations to the state of perfect competition somehow replicate many 40 MARK BLAUG f the desirable characteristics of perfect competition; in a word, second-best is so nearly ? rst-best that we may indeed employ ? rst-best as a standard. Open any textbook and what do we ? nd? The concept of perfect competition is said to be like the assumption of a perfect vacuum in physics; descriptively inaccurate, to be sure, but nevertheless productive of valid insights about actual economies. Thus, Samuelson and Nordhaus (1992, p. 295) in the 14th edition of their Economics concede that a perfect and absolutely ef? ient competitive mechanism has never existed and never will â€Å"but the oil crisis of the 1970s† is only one of their many examples of how an empirically empty competitive model can nevertheless produce the right answers to a concrete imperfectly competitive situation (for other textbook treatments, see Blaug, 1997, pp. 69–70). This is prec isely what Reder (1982, p. 12), called the notion of â€Å"tight prior equilibrium†, which he thought was characteristic of the Chicago School of Economics: â€Å"one may treat observed prices and quantities as good approximations to their long-run equilibrium values†. Call this the good-approximation assumption. Unfortunately, the idea of a near or far approximation to perfect competition has absolutely no logical meaning. We seem conveniently to have forgotten the famous Lipsey–Lancaster (1996) second-best theorem published in 1956, according to which we are either at a ? rst-best optimum or it matters not whether we are at second-best or tenth-best because we cannot rigorously demonstrate that doing away with a tax or a tariff that put us at tenth-best will bring us closer to ? st-best in a welfare sense of these terms. This theorem has not been conveniently forgotten; it has been deliberately forgotten because it wreaks havoc with the end-state, ? rst-best conception of competition. Must we therefore cease to give advice on competition policy? I think not; but what it does mean is that instead of gnostic pronouncements about the desirability of any move in the direction of ? st-best perfect competition, we must engage instead in qualitat ive judgements about piecemeal improvements, embracing a dynamic process-conception of competition, which is precisely the old classical conception that Schumpeter, Hayek, Clark and modern neo-Austrians have urged us to adopt. To grasp why it was necessary to revive this tradition, we must spend a moment explaining why modern price theory is so strong on the nature of the competitive equilibrium end-state and so weak on the process by which competition drives a market towards a ? al equilibrium. III. The Awful Legacy of General Equilibrium Theory When Walras literally invented general equilibrium (GE) in 1871, he was just as much concerned with the process-conception of competition known as â€Å"the stability problem† as in what we have called the end-state interpretation of equilibrium known as â€Å"the existence problem† – is simultaneous multimarket-equilibrium possible in a capitalist economy? But gradually, in successive editions of his Elements of Pure Economics, the existence problem came ever more to the fore, while the sta- IS COMPETITION SUCH A GOOD THING? 41 bility problem receded in the background (Walker, 1996). Even so, Walras’s view of how markets adjust in disequilibrium was always somewhat naive. It is a story which we all learn in our ? rst course of economics: in response to the appearance of excess demand and supply, prices adjust automatically as independently acting buyers and sellers â€Å"grope† their way to a ? al equilibrium. When this tatonnement story is well told, it sounds utterly convincing and at such times we are apt to forget that many markets, particularly labour markets and â€Å"customer markets†, react faster in terms of quantities than in terms of prices (as Marshall always insisted in opposition to Walras) and sometimes only in terms of quantities (see Blaug, 1997, pp. 71–75). But prices and quantities aside, what about product ifferentiation and competition by maintenance and service agreements, what about Schumpeterian competition in terms of new products and processes, new methods of marketing, new organizational forms and new reward structures for employees? In short, all the forms of rivalry between producers which Chamberlain and Robinson have taught us to call monopolistic or imperfect competition (the irony of calling what cannot exist, perfect competition, and what always exists, imperfect competition, never ceases to amuse me! . Walras struggled manfully to provide a rigorous solution to the existence problem but never got much beyond counting equations and unknowns to ensure that there were enough demand and supply equations to solve for the unknown equilibrium prices and quantities in the economy. As for the stability problem, he solved that after much hesitation by simply eliminating disequilibrium transactions as â€Å"false trading† (another wonderfully ironic piece of rhetoric). Although he never mentioned the concept of a ? tional auctioneer announcing different prices until an equilibrium price is discovered, whereupon trade is allowed to take place – this is one of those historical myths that subsequent generations have invented – it is dif? cult to avoid the conclusion that he simply gave up the effort to provide a convincing account of how real-world competitive markets achieve GE. Such an account has in fact never been provided even to this date. In 1954, Arrow and Debreu ? nally solved the existence problem by modern mathematical techniques – topological properties of convexity, ? ed point theorems, Nash equilibria, etcetera – of which Walras could never have dreamt but, in so doing, they travelled even further than Walras had from anything smacking of descriptive accuracy: there are forward markets in their GE model for all goods and services in the economy, including all locations and conceivable contingen t states in which these goods and services might be consumed, and yet no one holds cash to deal with the likelihood that income and expenditure may fail to synchronize. They were perfectly candid about this failure to describe actual economies. Indeed, they made a virtue of the purely formal properties of their model. 1 1 As Debreu (1959, p. x) expressed it in his Theory of Value: â€Å"The theory of value is treated here with the standards of rigor of the contemporary formalist school of mathematics . . . . Allegiance to rigor dictates the axiomatic form of the analysis where the theory, in the strict sense, is logically entirely disconnected from its interpretation†. And yet this book claimed to be a work in economics! 42 MARK BLAUG They cracked the existence problem, not to mention the uniqueness problem – is there one unique vector of prices at which GE exists? but they never tackled the stability problem. In other words, after a century or more of endless re? nements of the central core of GE theory, an exercise which has engaged some of the best brains in twentieth-century economics, the theory is unable to shed any light on how market equilibrium is actually attained, not just in a real-world decentrali zed market economy but even in the toy economies beloved of GE theorists. We may conclude that GE theory as such is a cul de sac: it has no empirical content and never will have empirical content. Moreover, even regarded as a research program in social mathematics, it must be condemned as an almost total failure. That is not to say that highly aggregated computable GE models, such as IS-LM, are pointless or that a GE formulation of an economic problem, emphasizing the interdependence of all sectors of the economy, may not prove illuminating but simply that Walrasian GE theory – the notion that the existence of multi-market equilibrium may be studied in a way that is analogous to solving a set of simultaneous equations – has proved in the fullness of time to be an utterly sterile innovation. The real paradox is that the existence, uniqueness and stability of GE should ever have been considered an interesting question for economists to answer: a complete satisfactory proof of all three aspects of the problem would no doubt have been a considerable intellectual feat in logic but would not in any way have enhanced our understanding of how actual economic systems work. IV. The Welfare Implications of GE Of course, Walras hoped to show, not just that GE is possible, but that it is good. But here too he never got much beyond the idea that voluntary exchange between two parties improves both of their welfares – otherwise, why would they have traded? What is true of bilaterial exchange will also be true of competitive exchange between a large number of traders if individual producers cannot themselves set prices, so that all consumers face identical prices for identical homogeneous commodities. This is precisely where the notion of perfect competition as an end-state of rest comes into welfare economics grounded in GE theory. Pareto, who was a much better technician than Walras, carried on where Walras left off. He too was convinced that GE is good for everyone but as a follower of Ernest Mach in philosophy, he hated such metaphysical ideas as maximising happiness, utility, welfare, or call it what you will, and he strenuously objected to interpersonal comparisons of utility (ICU) on the grounds that such comparison could not be operationalised. Pondering these issues, he realised that the one circumstance that avoids ICU is a social state which meets with unanimous approval or at least with the absence of con? ict in which one person is only made better off at the expense of another person. In other words, we want a state which is so ef? cient that there is no surplus, no waste, no slack, â€Å"no such thing as a free lunch†. But is not perfect competition just such a state? Of course, it may leave some people rich IS COMPETITION SUCH A GOOD THING? 3 and some people poor but that will be the consequence of the fact that we started with unequal endowments of the individuals in our economy – some people are born clever and some people have rich parents – but, given those endowments that are not themselves explained by GE theory – no theory ever explains everything – the GE model will grind out the rental prices of all the services of land, labor and capital as well as the prices of all goods , produced with those services. Once we have somehow arrived at the end-state of perfectly competitive equilibrium, it will be impossible to make one person better off without making another person worse off except by interfering with the initial endowments of agents. In this way, Pareto thought that he had ? nally found an admittedly narrow de? nition of the bene? cial effects of competition that was totally free of that positivist bugbear, ICU. The idea, only later called â€Å"Pareto optimality†, fell into oblivion as soon as it was announced but was rescued along with Walrasian GE theory in the 1930s by John Hicks and Nicholas Kaldor. They extended the scope of Pareto optimality by arguing that any economic change, whether from a position of competitive equilibrium or not, was welfare improving if the gains to bene? ciaries of that change were large enough to enable them at least in principle, to bribe the losers voluntarily to accept the change. The existences of such potential Pareto improvement (PPI), as they are nowadays called, still involves no ICU because it is grounded on the voluntariness of market exchange. In short, Hicks and Kaldor (with a prodding from Lionel Robbins) stayed true to the Paretian conception of how an economist should study welfare economics. At ? rst glance, the Hick–Kaldor compensation test does seem virtually to pull a rabbit out of a hat but further re? ection soon showed that the achievement was semantic, not substantive. Why is it a potential and not an actual PI? The moment we try to implement PPI by encouraging gainers and losers to negotiate a bribe, they will engage in strategic bargaining and even without fancy game theory, it is easy to see that they may never reach an agreement. If the change has political signi? cance, the state may then intervene to force the parties to agree – in which case we have said goodbye to our taboo on ICU. No matter how we slice it, in the end we cannot avoid (1) a qualitative judgement from on high of the size of the PPI – remember that there is no objective way short of voluntary trade to measure the magnitude of a gain or a loss to the parties concerned – and (2) an interpersonal comparison of that gain and loss to the respective parties. But all that brings us back to Marshall and Pigou whose Economics of Welfare (1921) had none of Pareto’s compunctions about ICU and was perfectly content to declare that a pound sterling taken from a rich man by a progressive income tax hurt him less than the pleasure it gave the poor man when it was handed over to him. We have not quite reached the end of the story. The Arrow–Debreu proof of the existence of GE in 1954 was almost contemporary with Arrow’s proof of what he labelled the First and Second Fundamental Theorems of welfare economics. The ? st theorem demonstrates that every competitive equilibrium in a decentralized economy is Pareto-optimal, which we have already discussed, and the second 44 MARK BLAUG theorem demonstrates that a Pareto-optimum can always be achieved via perfect competition if lump-sum taxes and transfers are feasible, so that whatever were the original endowments of agents, we can still make everyone better off with a perfectly compe titive economy. Immense pains are taken in every textbook of microeconomics to persuade readers of the validity of those two theorems. And they are valid – as mathematical exercises. Lump-sum taxes and transfers are changes which do not affect economic behaviour and even the most ingenious modern welfare economists have never been able to come up with a convincing example of such things. 2 I think that we may safely conclude that the First and Second Fundamental Theorems of welfare economics are just mental exercises without the slightest possibility of ever being practically relevant. They are what Ronald Coase (1988) called â€Å"blackboard economics†, an economics that is easy to write on a blackboard in a classroom but that bears no resemblance to the world outside the classroom. V. Why Is Competition Good? I contend that perfect competition is a grossly misleading concept whose only real value is to generate examination questions for students of economics. 3 It is misleading because it breeds the view that economics is a subject like Euclidean geometry, whose conclusion may be rigorously deduced from fundamental axioms of behaviour plus some hard facts about technology. But of course this does not imply that competition is bad. I, along with most economists, believe that competition is good. But if perfect competition is impossible, and Pareto-optimality almost impossible, what is the basis of this belief in the desirability of competition? It is based on a concept of dynamic ef? ciency, the outcome of competitive processes, and not the static ef? ciency of Walras, Pareto and the First and Second Fundamental Theorems of welfare economics. The schizophrenia of economists on this issue is simply extraordinary. The manin-the-street favours capitalism because it is ultimately responsive to consumers’ demands, technologically dynamic and produces the goods that are wanted at low cost; of course, it also suffers from periodic slumps, more or less chronic unemployment even in booms, and frequently generates a highly-unequal distribution 2 They would have to be randomly assigned to individuals or else to re? ect some personal noneconomic characteristic, such as more consonants than vowels in one’s last name. It used to be thought that a uniform poll tax was a perfect example of a limp-sum tax but as Mrs. Thatcher discovered it had a most profound effect on economic behaviour: almost a million people disappeared from the electoral roll in Britain because the poll tax could not be collected without a home address. 3 I concede reluctantly that it has its uses for purposes of answering comparative statics questions on taxes and subsidies but even these have much less practical signi? cance than is usually assumed (see Vickers, 1995). IS COMPETITION SUCH A GOOD THING? 5 of income. 4 Still, on balance the good outweighs the bad and without becoming Panglossian, he or she votes for capitalism – and so do virtually all economists. But is this what we teach in our textbooks? To ask the question is to already answer it. Can one actually teach the principles of dynamic ef? ciency? Of course, one can and that is what we do in every course in industrial organization (and in every course in man agement schools), where, alas, we have to undo the brainwashing that students have undergone in their courses on microeconomics. In so doing, we employ historical comparisons and case studies, and these can only cultivate the ability to make informed judgements about speci? c attempts at what Popper called â€Å"piecemeal social engineering†, making the world a little better here and there, because we do not know enough to make the whole world best once and for all. VI. Some Conclusions: Coase and Posner Beliefs in the ef? cacy of antitrust law ? ts neatly into the concept of dynamic ef? ciency, or what Clark called â€Å"workable competition†. A question like: should we break up Microsoft or just reprimand and perhaps ? e the company? does not lend itself to a precise answer by the edicts of economists and it is just as well that it does not. Empirical science frequently proceeds on the untidy basis of what is plausible rather than what can be formally demonstrated beyond any doubt. The structureconduct-performance paradigm of yesteryear, associated with names of Edward Mason and Joe Bain, did j ust that but that has since been superseded by game theory and transaction cost on the one hand and the Chicago School of Richard Posner and Robert Bork on the other hand. In between we ? d Ronald Coase and the widely misunderstood Coase Theorem as the very centre piece of the law and economics movement. Since this so-called inappropriately named theorem picks up a number of the themes in welfare economics that we have discussed above, let us close with a brief discussion of it. As stated by its inventor, George Stigler (1966, p. 113), the Coase Theorem is the proposition that â€Å"under perfect competition private and social costs will be equal† and hence â€Å"the composition of output will not be affected by the manner in which the law assigns liability for damage†. This combines two claims in one, the ? rst of which will be familiar to us: (1) an ef? ciency claim that perfect competition is always optimal if voluntary bargaining between the affected parties to their mutual advantage is possible at zero transaction costs, de? ned as the costs of making deals, negotiating contracts, and policing the enforcement of those contracts (Allen, 2000), and (2) an invariance claim that the ? nal allocation of resources is invariant to different initial assignments of property rights provided these are in fact clearly de? ed. A voluminous literature has shown that both propositions are either highly contentious or else a tautology if perfect competition, perfect information and zero 4 In an instructive essay, Richard Nelson (1981 reiterates my charge of schizophrenia and adds to my list of the bene? ts of a private enterprise system of capitalism that of â€Å"administrative parsimony†, an echo of Hayek’s discussion of the merits of competiti ve prices as information signals. 46 MARK BLAUG transaction costs are rigorously de? ned (Medema and Zorbe, 2000). Lo and behold, however, Coase has argued ever more vehemently that transaction costs can be reduced by appropriate judicial decisions but that they can never be reduced to zero even under Cournot-type perfect competition. Of course, if we de? ne perfect information as literally foreseeing every alternative opportunity under all possible contingencies, now and in the future, it follows immediately that we can write and enforce contracts at zero costs (zero in ? nancial outlays, in time and even in cognitive effort), in which case only increasing returns to scale will prevent us achieving perfect competition. Once transaction costs are zero and competition is perfect, it follows immediately that the distribution of property rights cannot matter. In short, the Coase Theorem is just a logical corollary of perfect competition and perfect information but that does little to persuade us that it is much more than a logical theorem. 5 As for the more controversial invariance claim, income and wealth effects in consumption patterns and the strategic behaviour of the injured and injuring parties as they enter into voluntary bargaining (the old objection to Hicks–Kaldor compensation payments) will certainly make the ? al allocation of resources sensitive to the way in which the law of the moment assigns liability for damage. Are we really to believe that my claim against the American Tobacco Company for giving me lung cancer will be decided in 2002 in exactly the same way it would have been decided in 1940? Coase (1964, p. 105) said it all 35 years ago: Contemplation of an optimal system may provide techniques of analysis that would otherwise have been missed and, in certain special cases, it may go far to providing a solution. But in general its in? uence has been pernicious. It has directed economists’ attention away from the main question, which is how alternative arrangements will actually work in practice. It has led economists to derive conclusions for economic policy from a study of an abstract of a market situation. Richard Posner, in his in? uential textbook, Economic Analysis of Law (1998), now in its ? fth edition, subsumes Pareto optimality and the Coase Theorem in an ef? ciency logic of â€Å"wealth maximization†. He claims not only that common law, statute law and judge-made law should serve to maximize wealth, so that for example entitlements in property law should be shifted to the more productive litigants as evidenced by their willingness to pay, but that legal entitlements and hence resources actually tend to gravitate towards their most valuable use if voluntary exchange is permitted. Without saying so, Posner clearly believes that we can 5 Moreover, as Allen (2000, pp. 904–905) argues quite rightly, the famous Modigliani-Miller Theorem of corporate nance – if capital markets are perfect, the value of a ? rm is invariant to its debt-equity ratio – and the Ricardo Equivalence Theorem of government ? nance – if capital markets are perfect, the level of household wealth is invariant to the ratio of taxes to the size of the public debt – are both special cases of the Coase Theorem because all taxes, debt obligations and equity shares are simply delineation s of property rights; in a world of zero transaction costs, both ? rms and governments could decide on debt levels by tossing a coin. IS COMPETITION SUCH A GOOD THING? 47 isolate PPI, divorcing ef? ciency from equity without committing ourselves to ICU, in short, he believes in classic or rather neoclassical Paretian welfare economics. Although he deals at length with distributional issues arising from liability rules and various forms of taxation, he never lays down any general principles about income redistribution, such as, for example, Pigou did: any transfer of income from the rich to the poor that does not diminish national income was deemed desirable by Pigou. What he argues, when criticized, is simply that users of distributive justice will have to be addressed outside the framework of standard economic analysis (Parisi, 2000). But this is exactly what Pareto, Kaldor and Hicks said years ago. Orthodox welfare economics, including the â€Å"ef? ciency of the common law hypothesis† upheld by Posner, has simply stood still ever since the 1930s. This notion of a neat divorce of ef? ciency from equity, of an objective value-free de? nition of ef? iency, has haunted economics from its outset but it is, of course, a will-o’-the-wisp: there is in fact a different ef? ciency outcome for every different distribution of income, and vice versa. Ef? ciency is necessarily a value-laden term and welfare economics is necessarily normative, that is, a matter of good or bad and not true or false. 6 However, there is real merit in treating ef? ciency and equity questions lexicographically, so that we can be as explicit as possible about our di stributional judgements, but that is not because we can ever decisively separate them. My complaint about Posner is that he evades all these fundamental questions in applied welfare economics. Not only does he fail to tell us how to add equity to ef? ciency but he does not even tell us whether ef? ciency means static ef? ciency or dynamic ef? ciency. There is an almost deliberate fuzziness of language in all his writings, which smacks of ideology rather than science. If we are going to employ the economist’s language of ef? ciency, we ought to be told just how to apply it and why ef? ciency should be our standard for judging the consequences of the law. One of Clark’s old rules of â€Å"workable competition†, such that entry into industries should be kept as free as is technically feasible taking due account of sunk costs, if necessary by antitrust legislation, is more relevant for public policy than Posner’s continual appeal to the principle of wealth maximization. The Chicago school does not deny that there is a case for antitrust law but they doubt that it is a strong case because most markets, even in the presence of high concentration ratios, are â€Å"contestable† (Bork, 1978). How do we know? We know because the good-approximation assumption: the economy is never far away from its perfectly competitive equilibrium growth path! Believe it or not, that is all there is to the â€Å"antitrust revolution† of the Chicago School. 6 Some economists believe, extraordinarily enough, that welfare economics is positive and not evaluative at all (see Hennipman, 1992; Blaug, 1992, chap. 8, 1993). 48 References MARK BLAUG Allen, Douglas W. (2000) ‘Transaction Costs’, in Bouckaert and De Geest, eds. , pp. 893–926. Blaug, Mark (1992) The Methodology of Economics, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blaug, Mark (1993) ‘Pieter Hennipman on Paretian Welfare Economics: A Comment’, De Economist, 141, 127–129. Blaug, Mark (1997) ‘Competition as an End-State and Competition as a Process’, in Not Only an Economist. Recent Essays. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 66–86. Bork, Robert H. (1978) The Antitrust Paradox: A Policy at War with Itself. New York: Basic Books. 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