...By John D. Mueller Colloquium on the American Founding Amherst University, October 19, 2002 Winston Churchill is supposed to have said that “the Americans can be relied upon to do the right thing, after exhausting the alternatives.” I hold a similar tempered optimism about the economics profession, with which have been associated by occupation for more than 20 years. Historically, economic theory originated in the happy union of Athens and Jerusalem known as “the natural law,” and has always returned to the sanity of its roots—after exhausting the alternatives. As I read its history, economic theory has nearly completed its last great detour away from sanity, and is rapidly running out of alternatives to a renewal of “natural-law economics.” If such a renewal occurs, it won’t be because economists have decided to sit down and learn from philosophers (or, God forbid, theologians)—nothing could be farther from their minds—but for the same reason as the last seismic shift in economics, which began in the 1870s: a growing number of economists are finding the current state of economic theory a professional embarrassment. Of course, I may be underestimating the average economist’s threshold of embarrassment. But let me explain the nature of that * John D. Mueller is Associate Scholar of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and president of LBMC LLC, a financial-markets forecasting firm. For most of the 1980s he was Economic Counsel to the House Republican Conference...
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...Auditing Cases An Interactive Learning Approach FIFTH M F S D E D ITIO N S. B A. B M. G F. P Boston Columbus Indianapolis New York San Francisco Upper Saddle River Amsterdam Cape Town Dubai London Madrid Milan Munich Paris Montreal Toronto Delhi Mexico City Sao Paulo Sydney Hong Kong Seoul Singapore Taipei Tokyo Editor in Chief: Donna Battista Acquisitions Editor: Stephanie Wall Editorial Project Manager: Christina Rumbaugh Senior Managing Editor: Cynthia Zonneveld Production Project Manager: Carol O'Rourke Senior Operations Supervisor: Diane Peirano Printer/Binder: BindRite Graphics, Robbinsville Credits and acknowledgments borrowed from other sources and reproduced, with permission, in this textbook appear on the appropriate page within text. Copyright © 2012, 2009, 2006, 2003, 2000 by Pearson Education, Inc., publishing Prentice Hall. All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America. This publication is protected by Copyright, and permission should be obtained from the publisher prior to any prohibited reproduction, storage in a retrieval system, or transmission in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or likewise. To obtain permission(s) to use material from this work, please submit a written request to Pearson Education, Inc., Permissions Department, One Lake Street, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey 07458, or you may fax your request to 201-236-3290. Many of the designations by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish...
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...Instructor’s Manual Operations and Process Management: Principles and Practice for Strategic Impact Second Edition Nigel Slack Stuart Chambers Robert Johnston Alan Betts ISBN: 978-0-273-71852-9 Pearson Education Limited 2009 Contents Part 1: Teaching Guide ........................................................................................................................................ 7 Chapter 1: Operations and processes.................................................................................................................... 8 Chapter 2: Operations strategy ........................................................................................................................... 12 Chapter 3: Supply network design...................................................................................................................... 19 Chapter 4: Process design 1 – positioning.......................................................................................................... 22 Chapter 5: Process design 2 – analysis ............................................................................................................... 26 Chapter 6: Product and service design processes ............................................................................................... 31 Chapter 7: Supply chain management ................................................................................................................ 34 Chapter...
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...THE B L A C K SWAN The HIGHLY I mpact IM of the PROBABLE Nassim Nicholas Taleb U.S.A. $26.95 Canada $34.95 is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpre dictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9 / 1 1 . For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives. A BLACK SWAN Why do we not acknowledge the phenomenon of black swans until after they occur? Part of the answer, according to Taleb, is that humans are hardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused on generalities. We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don't know. We are, therefore, unable to truly estimate oppor tunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the "impossible." For years, Taleb has studied how we fool our selves into thinking we know more than we actually do. We restrict our thinking to the irrelevant and inconsequential, while large events continue to surprise us and shape our world. Now, in this reve latory book, Taleb explains everything we know about what we don't know. He offers...
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