- “It may seem silly to lament over music selections in an exercise class, but it’s an issue that fitness companies may increasingly face as they transform from traditional health companies into media publishers. Let’s face it: working out can be boring, and people are willing to pay top dollar to have someone yell at us while sweating to the latest Migos track. Combine that with the flexibility to exercise in your own home on your own time and it’s a revenue strategy that has helped brands like Equinox, Pure Barre, SoulCycle, and Physique 57 tap into a demographic that previously found the studios inaccessible. Even companies like ClassPass and Fitbit have also expanded beyond their initial product of a subscription service and fitness trackers, offering their own guided fitness sessions for $8 to $15 a month.”
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I don’t know if you have heard of any of these services, but the legal angle of copyrights is worth reading about.
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.. - “Respect among Russians for Josef Stalin has surged to the highest level of President Vladimir Putin’s era, with 70 percent saying his rule had been good for the country, according to a poll tracking attitudes toward the Soviet dictator.”
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With an excerpt like that, why would you not want to read more?
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.. - “Japan has certainly lost the late 1980s bubble-economy swagger that once terrified Western chief executive officers. Yet neither is the world’s third-biggest economy some sort of Mad Max economic dystopia. Japan remains a rich country, home to some of the best infrastructure and fastest bullet trains, leading auto and robotics industries, and one of the highest life expectancy rates. It’s a financial superpower—the largest creditor nation and provider of investment and savings, with net external assets of almost $3 trillion. Japan’s megabanks are the foremost lenders in Asia outside of China.At the moment, Japan looks like an island of stability among developed nations that are riven by polarized debates about unfettered capital flows, free trade, and open borders. Ordinary Japanese aren’t being torn asunder by American-scale income inequality and culture wars, grappling with a slow-motion train wreck like Brexit, or coping with French-style yellow vest worker protests on the streets of Tokyo.”
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Is Japan growing? No. But so, this article asks, what? Also a good overview of all of what Japan has tried in the last thirty years or so, in terms of economics and society.
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.. - “Documents seen by the Financial Times and extensive interviews with more than a dozen senior figures in the <word removed by me> world show a co-ordinated global effort by the Russian state, through ambassadors and representatives of its banks and biggest companies, to win votes with promises of money and political pressure. ”
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Without cheating, can you guess what this article is about? Once you have made a guess, click through to find out what the article is about.
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.. - “Exxon’s arrangement in Texas reflects, in miniature, our national state of indecision about the best approach to climate change. Depending on whom you ask, climate change doesn’t exist, or is an engineering problem, or requires global mobilization, or could be solved by simply nudging the free market into action. Absent a coherent strategy, opportunists can step in and benefit in wily ways from the shifting landscape. Tax-supported renewables in Texas take coal plants offline, but they also support oil extraction. Technology advances, but not the system underneath. Faced with this volatile and chaotic situation, the system does what it does best: It searches out profits in the short term.”
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Economics at play in terms of energy, policy, climate change, short term profits, incentives, horizons and so much more.
Tag: NYT
Links for 26th April, 2019
- “The world economy desperately needs a plan for “peaceful coexistence” between the United States and China. Both sides need to accept the other’s right to develop under its own terms. The US must not try to reshape the Chinese economy in its image of a capitalist market economy, and China must recognize America’s concerns regarding employment and technology leakages, and accept the occasional limits on access to US markets implied by these concerns.”
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Dani Rodrik explains the need for, as he puts it, peaceful coexistence – between China and the USA. My money is on this not happening: history, current affairs and game theory are my reasons for being less than optimistic.
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.. - “Yes, there was arsenic in Bangladesh’s wells, and it may have posed a health threat. But in areas where people were encouraged to switch away from the wells, child mortality jumped by a horrifying 45 percent — and adult mortality increased too. It turns out that the alternatives to the wells, for most people in Bangladesh, were all worse — surface water contaminated with waterborne diseases, or extended storage of water in the home, which is also a major disease risk.”
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Unintended consequences is one of the most underrated phrases in economics.
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.. - “Only one of Murdoch’s adult children would win the ultimate prize of running the world’s most powerful media empire, but all four of them would ultimately have an equal say in the direction of its future: Murdoch had structured both of his companies, 21st Century Fox and News Corp, so that the Murdoch Family Trust held a controlling interest in them. He held four of the trust’s eight votes, while each of his adult children had only one. He could never be outvoted. But he had also stipulated that once he was gone, his votes would disappear and all the decision-making power would revert to the children. This meant that his death could set off a power struggle that would dwarf anything the family had seen while he was alive and very possibly reorder the political landscape across the English-speaking world.”
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A very long, but very entertaining and informative read about the Murdoch family – its rise, its stumbles and its influence on the world today. Be warned, this is only the first part – but the entire thing is a great read.
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.. - “There has been a lot of churn in the Sensex over the decades. Corporate power in India seems to be more fragile than usually understood. Only a handful of companies such as Tata Motors, Hindustan Unilever, Mahindra & Mahindra, ITC, and Larsen & Toubro have managed to hold their place in the index. Many of the older industrial houses such as the Thapar group, the Walchand group and the Kirloskar group have slipped out of the benchmark index. Even the real estate and infrastructure giants who had a strong presence in the Sensex a decade ago — Jaiprakash Associates, Reliance Infrastructure and DLF, for example — are no longer in the index.”
Niranjan Rajadhakshya writes in Livemint about the churn in the Sensex. Worth reading for the chart alone that appears midway through the article.
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.. - “The government has tried to change ideas about death through directives and incentives. In 2016, officials issued guidelines for encouraging more burials within nature, rather than delineating plots for tombs and memorials. In a revised law on funeral management in September, the central government called on local governments to provide financial support for public cemeteries, which would be cheaper for residents.”
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An interesting read about the burial problem in China, and what they’re doing about it.
Links for 19th April, 2019
- “I don’t seem to have any less energy. When I’m in the Johnson library I’m still there from 9 to 5. And I’d like to feel — but I don’t really feel — that I’ve learned something about writing. If I told you what I thought people would laugh because my books are so long, but I often think of Renoir and how his painting got simpler and simpler and better and better. I don’t say my writing has gotten better but sometimes you think, Oh, I can do this.”
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A fascinating interview in the NYT of Robert Caro.
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.. - “From Wednesday, the payment company is to begin contacting essay-writing firms, giving them notice that they should “move their business elsewhere”.But this will not be an “overnight ban” – as there will be debates over which services are helping students to cheat and which are offering legitimate tutoring assistance.”
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A very, very large can of worms has been opened by Paypal.
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.. - “If you neutrally described the typical Sopranos episode, almost anyone hypothetical juror would hand down centuries of jail time. As you watch, however, righteous verdicts are far from your mind. Why? ”
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I’ve just begun watching the Sopranos, so this didn’t make too much sense right now, but this part caught my eye in the whole article.
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.. - “The challenge is how do we adapt to that increased efficiency, which is very much like what happened to agriculture. Agriculture has become so efficient that now it’s kind of irrelevant to the economy, less than two percent of our working population. And that what’s happening to traditional capitalist—particularly manufacturing—activity. Today in America only a four-and-a-half percent of workers are doing production work in manufacturing. There are more 50-year-old men on disability than doing production work in manufacturing—precisely because it’s become so productive. Fewer people are producing goods. More people are producing services.”
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Larry Summers looks back at 2008. Somewhat standard stuff, but this excerpt above was quite interesting.
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.. - “Land and money are two of the most neglected concepts in economic theory. Land is immobile, irreproducible and appreciates in value over time due to collective investment – none of these features apply to capital goods. Yet modern economics and national accounts treat them as one and the same.”
The quote above was quoted in the article – a meta quote, if you will – but the article is a good reminder of the importance of the idea of rent.
Links for 21st March, 2019
- “In a 2011 paper, trade-policy researchers Anwarul Hoda and Shravani Prakash analyzed the impact of “the proclivity of the U.S. administration to leverage the GSP program to achieve its economic and political objectives.” They found that with major developing-country trading partners “the reciprocity requirement has proved to be ineffectual.” In 1992, the U.S. stopped India’s preferential access for chemicals and pharmaceuticals in an effort to improve intellectual-property protection. New Delhi shrugged off the pain, and waited for a World Trade Organization agreement before amending its patent law, the researchers noted.”
Andy Mukherjee doesn’t think the removal of the GSP support by the USA will have any meaningful impact on India’s exports to that country. He also cites an interesting paper (which I haven’t read yet), which seems to say essentially the same thing. - “The opportunity is simple to describe but requires real effort to achieve: the community must enforce systems that build the external costs into the way that the industrialist does business. Faced with an incentive to decrease bycatch, waste or illness, the industrialist will do what industrialists always seek to do–make it work a little better, a little faster, a little more profitably.Industrialism can’t solve every problem, but it can go a very long way in solving the problems that it created in the first place.”
Seth Godin (whose blog is a remarkable thing, by the way) gives his take on externalities, and makes the case that economists take a far too restrictive, anti-septic view of the problem. I’m putting words into his mouth, but that’s how I interpret it – and I’d agree. Certain problems can be identified best by economists, but perhaps the solutions lie outside the textbook. A useful article to read for starting discussions around externalities, the Coase theorem, Elinor Ostrom’s work, the role of culture in economics. - “When it comes to the institutional framework, there are obviously massive differences between India and China. Any leader in India must contend with parliament, the courts and state governments. Also known as democracy. That limits how quickly stuff can get done. It can also save politicians from serious mistakes. China has competing interests and constituencies as well, but it’s not the same sport, let alone ballpark.”
The article is about India’s less than stellar economic growth in the previous quarter, but that paragraph above was important to me. India is a functioning democracy, China anything but. That has it’s advantages, and its disadvantages – to both. A point worth remembering in many ways – one of which part of the focus of this article. - “In the process, Netflix has discovered something startling: Despite a supposed surge in nationalism across the globe, many people like to watch movies and TV shows from other countries. “What we’re learning is that people have very diverse and eclectic tastes, and if you provide them with the world’s stories, they will be really adventurous, and they will find something unexpected,” Cindy Holland, Netflix’s vice president for original content, told me.”
Farhad Majoo in the NYT about why Netflix is such a good thing. It’s a useful article to understand the impact Netflix is having the world over – but also a good article to learn about pricing, the implications of pricing, content discovery on Netflix. - “For several years, India’s banks have been in the spotlight over their problematic lending to prominent industrialists. Now the mutual funds and non-bank lenders — who have taken increasingly important roles in the credit system amid the banks’ woes — are coming under similar scrutiny. That is good for the development of the Indian financial sector. But it is yet another headache for some hard-pressed members of the promoter class.”
Simon Mundy in the FT on how the IBC has provided teeth to creditors in India – which is genuinely good news. But the transition is unlikely to be smooth, and there may well be some unexpected skeletons waiting to tumble out of the closet. A good read for finance, bankruptcy and non-bank lending in India.
EconForEverybody 