Posts Tagged “economics”
Ross • 29th Jul 2010 • Thinking • business, economics, free market, health, heart, medicine, microeconomics, NHS, profit
The next time a zealot headbanger doorsteps you to tell you how bringing proft motives into the NHS is evil, kindly point them to this BBC article:
With its varnished wooden floors and plush sofas the European Scanning Centre looks more like a boutique hotel than somewhere to scan your heart. But it is the first in the country to have a CT scanner that can produce a three-dimensional picture of a patient’s heart with a very low radiation dose….
…Having a CT scan is much safer than an angiogram, where one in every 500 patients suffers a heart attack or stroke….
…The scan is also cheaper, says Dr Kostas Manis, a GP in Bexley. “The angiogram is £1,300, and the private clinic scanner is £900 and we’re negotiating to bring the figure down to £600.”
A better medical service, in nicer surroundings, with less risk, and at less cost. This is why I love competitive markets.
Ross • 26th Jul 2010 • Learning • banking, business, economics, finance
…private sector balance sheets will always fail at internalizing systemic risk. The official sector will always have to step in to help.
This is one of the conclusions of a New York Fed paper (PDF) on the shadow banking system, which provides a good overview and definition of the sector.
Ross • 21st Jul 2010 • Living, Thinking • britain, economics, finance, government, inflation, investments, macroeconomy, personal finance, savings, uk
The Economist‘s Buttonwood notes that NS&I have just withdrawn their index-linked savings certificates. Like Buttonwood, my wife and I hold these products. Buttonwood thinks that “the government is preparing the ground for a round of debt-eroding inflation.” It’s hard to disagree – NS&I product offers can be treated as revealed preferences, and they now look as if they prefer paying (much) larger nominal rates than (much) smaller real rates. I can think of no other reason why this should be the case, other than inflation expectations. This is likely to be good for the dollar, good for gold and good for UK exporters. But my 2011 ski season may need to be scaled back – perhaps I should have bought slightly more of the certificates.
Ross • 20th May 2010 • Learning, Thinking • capitalism, economics, libertarianism, liberty, philosophy
From Marginal Revolution I learn of the Unincorporated Man, a sci-fi book in which people are born with rights to only 75% of their incomes. The rest is shared between their parents and Government. Further ‘shares’ can be sold to pay for things such as degree courses, or, well, anything I guess. The Government’s 5% share in you at birth represents the only form of ‘taxation’ under this model.
I think this libertarian model is neat, and it makes the share of your income that Governments presume to ’own’ a lot more transparent. Ditto your duty to your parents. However, it does creates an incentive to dupe your investors. For example you could sell stock in yourself to fund a college degree and an MBA, then develop a drinking problem and use the dip in share-price to buy-back your stock. Perhaps the Incorporated Man would need to be audited by doctors?
Apparently, this firm is already pioneering this idea, in Latin America.
Ross • 8th Apr 2010 • Learning • business, economics, industry, piracy
Piracy has an established business model, a developing management lexicon, a developing literature, and its own public relations. A rum comment on the FT’s story asks:
How long before they’re talking about “a new parrot-digm” or “a raft of new initiatives” to “take piracy into the twenty-first century” ?
Ross • 6th Apr 2010 • Thinking • america, economics, freedom, globalisation, markets, political economy
Just as European nation-states free ride on the American defense shield, allowing them to invest less in military defense than they otherwise would, so too can European individuals free ride on the entrepreneurship that emerges from the American model.
A good point, from Ben Casnocha. As I see it, this is not an argument for America or the American model per se, but rather about having at least one place where free enterprise and free markets reign.
Ross • 18th Mar 2010 • Learning, Thinking • business, charter cities, ecological, economics, green, work
I have just come across Harvard Business Review‘s summary of ideas to watch in 2010. It’s great. Best bits:
- A Charter Cities plug
- It turns out that workers value progress in their workplaces. They like to hit project milestones and get stuff done. Managers don’t realise this.
- Short discussion of green bond financing for ecological building retro-fits.
There is also an ethically dubious encouragement to ‘hack work’. While I think this is valid in some cases, I don’t think it is a model that one should promote. In a good organisation, it shouldn’t be necessary, and the ideas that need to be promoted are those that fix the organisation, not learn to work around it more cunningly.
Ross • 1st Mar 2010 • Uncategorized • air miles, airmiles, arbitrage, california, economics, finance, hacks, money, pudding, reward, saving, usa
Why the museum of arbitrage? Well, because if arbitrage existed now, I would be doing it rather than writing this.
In 1999, UC-Davis civil engineer David Phillips was grocery shopping when he noticed something peculiar. Healthy Choice Foods was offering frequent-flyer miles to customers who bought its products. But a 25-cent pudding would bring 100 miles — the reward was worth more than the product itself.
Recognizing a good thing, Phillips bought 12,150 servings of pudding for $3,140, claiming he was stocking up for Y2K. Then he enlisted the Salvation Army to help him peel off the UPC codes, in exchange for donating the pudding.
He mailed his submission to Healthy Choice, and to their credit they awarded him 1.25 million frequent-flyer miles, enough for 31 round trips to Europe, 42 to Hawaii, 21 to Australia, or 50 anywhere in the United States.
There’s no downside. Phillips also got Aadvantage Gold status for life with American Airlines, which brings a special reservations number, priority boarding, upgrades, and bonus miles. And he got an $815 tax writeoff for donating the pudding.
Lifted wholesale from Futility Closet.
Ross • 1st Feb 2010 • Thinking • economics, government debt, politics, public finances, spending, Thinking, usa
Sometimes you read something that makes you challenge your opinions, in a positive way. Steve Landsburg’s piece on government spending vs government debt did that for me today. His argument: it’s not government debt that is problematic, but government spending.
Ross • 8th Nov 2009 • Learning, Thinking • africa, aid, Dambisa Moyo, development, economics, international development, William Easterly
I have just finished this book, by Dambisa Moyo. It’s a very simple argument. So simple that the preface by Niall Ferguson means you can skip the majority of the book. After an hour, you’ll have the idea. As Niall points out, it’s slightly annoying that these arguments are taken more seriously when they come from Dambisa, an intelligent, attractive Ghanaian, rather than from older, whiter (but equally intelligent) critics of aid, such as Bill Easterly. But that’s not to the discredit of Ms Moyo or the arguments. Somebody needs to get the fact that aid is not the answer on the radar. Moyo does a good job as the ‘anti-Bono’.
