Wednesday 14 May 2014

A request for a one-handed economist

Hoisted from the Economics Department all-staff email list: a request from an echo-chamber. I've redacted the sender's name and contact details. Meredith, our departmental administrator, sent it round on his request.
Subject: Request for speaker about Public Private Partnerships -- their disadvantages and weaknesses.
Thankyou Meredith for for helping me with my request.I am a member of the coalition  Keep Our Assets Canterbury. We wish to hold a seminar about the aspect of PPP's that I mentioned above. The stance of the coalition is that we oppose them.We hope to hold this seminar in late June or early July, on a Saturday.  We are wanting to have as many non- academic people  in the audience as possible. Participants in this proposed seminar are free to go elsewhere to be persuaded that PPP's are good.
Would any of your colleagues in the Dept of Economics at Canterbury be willing to be a speaker?If they are, I can be contacted by email, or at [redacted]
Would for a world in which coalitions sought to find out whether they were right rather than wanting only the confirmation of priors.

Seamus comments, "Well I guess, technically, a speaker who sees only disadvantages and weaknesses in PPPs and would much rather see assets sold off to the private-only sector would meet his criterion, but I'm not sure it is what he has in mind."

2 comments:

  1. Redirect them to BERL?

    ReplyDelete
  2. I think they are looking for volunteers, BERL only make s**t up if you pay them

    ReplyDelete