They're backing up again, so here are the first drafts of a few blog posts I'd write if I had the time:
1. Economic Myths: We are in the middle of an investment strike, with UK companies sitting on hundreds of billions that could be the key to recovery.
Nope. Money is a measure of indebtedness. Nobody borrows money for the fun of it, they borrow it in order to spend it. So if 'UK companies' have billions in the bank, that is because somebody else has already spent it, and those companies are waiting for it to be repaid in kind. The wealth has to be created by the people who owe money, not those who have already provided the goods and services and haven't been repaid in kind yet.
2. Advertising.
a) Advertising is good. It funds commercial television and makes up half the income of newspapers and close to 100% of 'free' internet services like Blogger.
b) Advertisements themselves are usually quite inane, but do offer some insights - I've seen a lot less government advertising over the past couple of years under the Tories (apart from the odd Change4Life).
c) Also interesting is the way they copy each other. Adverts for cars or perfume are largely indistinguishable from adverts for other cars or perfumes.
d) The Daily Mash highlighted a particularly irritating trend. See e.g. the one with the Indian looking lass with the white mother who washes at low temperatures. The one which really annoyed me was the John Lewis one (about a year ago) where the central character got older and older and you were just waiting for her children to turn up at John Lewis Funeral Services and order a nice polished box.
3. Supermarket convenience stores' pricing policies. This ties in with The Stigler's post of yesterday about motorway service stations. Of course they charge more in their Tesco Metro and Sainsbury's Local stores, you pay for the convenience.
Instead of a ten minute car journey, a few quid for petrol and ten minutes at the check-out, you pay a bit more and get it straight away, the difference is 'embedded rent' (these f-ers say that they have to charge higher prices to cover the higher rents. Wrong. The rents are higher because they can charge higher prices). Taking the value of your time and hassle into account, their convenience stores are not more expensive. Or else nobody would shop there.
4. This whole EU Referendum tomfoolery. Why is it such a big deal? The BBC did a surprisingly even-handed summary of the arguments for and against membership a couple of days ago, but that misses the point.
The point is surely that we humble voters are allowed to choose which party or coalition will oppress us and rip us off at a General Election every four or five years, if one lot gets too greedy, we boot them out and let the other lot oppress us for four or five years. Why shouldn't we - and all people in all other EU Member States - just have a referendum every four years on whether we want our particular country to stay in or leave, or indeed rejoin if we left the last time round? A bit of democratic legitimacy and all that, even if it is only a fig leaf. It need be no more dramatic than a team being relegated to the Championship and then being promoted back into the Premier League a couple of years later.
5. There is a reasonably enjoyable series called Mythbusters on Quest (available on Freeview) by people who are proper scientists, i.e. they test theories and are completely open minded about whether they turn out to be true or not.
Common sense tells us that if you have a sealed container with birds in it on perches and all the birds then take off and fly around, that the total mass of the whole container stays the same, so it must weight the same whether the birds are perched or flying. Instinct tells us it must be lighter. It's a bit like thinking about Ricardo's Law of Equivalence.
They actually made a sealed container, placed it on industrial strength but accurate scales, put a few dozen pigeons in it and got them to fly around. Unsurprisingly, the weight did not change (it went up sharply when they took off but soon went back to its original reading).
6. I've done posts on cars attacking houses. The Daily Mail ran a superb story yesterday: Is this the world's slowest crash? Drinkers rocked when runaway vintage steam roller smashes into 16th century pub at just 2mph.
Which obviously reminds of the scene towards the end of A Fish Called Wanda or Austin Powers trying to do a three-point turn.
7. You can't really expect to win an argument with reasonably intelligent people by lying:
I RECENTLY took part in a debate at the Cambridge Union, arguing in favour of the motion that “this House believes the modern welfare state is unsustainable”. Cambridge voted against me and, being a sore loser, I thought I’d put my case to the readers of City A.M. This is, after all, likely to be the defining political debate of the next 40 to 50 years.
State spending on the welfare state (education, health, pensions, benefits) was 11 per cent of GDP in 1935. It’s now around 33 per cent. We have a universal health service, universal education, universal state pensions, a benefits system in which 44 per cent of non-retired households get benefits other than child benefit, pensioner-age benefits, and social housing provision. Can we continue on the path we have travelled for 70 years? Surely not.
I've no idea how much state spending on welfare was in 1935, but it has been fairly stable at around a third of GDP for the last half century at least. If you do a projection based on the last fifty years, we'd expect it to still be at a about a third for the foreseeable.
His conclusion is way off piste as well:
It seems inevitable that we’ll move from a cradle-to-grave welfare state towards a more liberal concept, with the state providing genuine public goods and a limited safety-net. This will entail one generation paying twice: for their parents’ pay-as-you-go benefits, while being encouraged to save more for themselves. Funnily enough, it’s the vision that William Beveridge had in mind – a safety net creating a platform for more personal responsibility and civil society institutions.
Pay-as-you-go is the least bad way of running a welfare system, but why does he assume that the current generation of younger workers have to pay twice over, once for their parents and once for themselves? He overlooks the fact that they are paying three times over, they're paying again in higher house prices. We can level the playing field at a stroke by scrapping taxes on earned income and paying for welfare from the rental value of land instead.
8. Also, tolls at the Panama Canal, valuing an oil well and rent spikes in North Dakota.
Triple layer tinfoil
4 hours ago
6 comments:
"Also interesting is the way they copy each other. Adverts for cars or perfume are largely indistinguishable from adverts for other cars or perfumes."
I'm not sure about cars (I will post on that), but perfumes have the same demographics, age, income, sex. The buttons they are pushing are about "buy the perfume, you'll marry a rich men".
It's a bit different with Estee Lauder, which is mostly targetting women who got the man, and are now trying to make sure he doesn't run off with his secretary.
TS, I'm talking purely about the visuals.
All perfume adverts are black and white/muted colours, pretty young woman (often a famous actress), meets handsome young fellow, there might be a bit of light nudity involved, at the end you see the bottle and a deep male voice says the name of the perfume.
Car adverts are not quite as monotonous, but they don't really link into the brand*, I can remember quite a few of them but very few where I could say "Ah, do you remember that advertisement for Vauxhall, where..."
* VW is the only notable exception.
MW,
A lot of that is because of what works, I think.
Once products reach a point of functional maturity, ads then become about subliminal messages. But you've only got 1 minute to push a load of buttons about how your product will improve people's lives. And once you've got the ingredients that work, you use them.
A funny one I heard: beer ads always have 3 blokes walking into a pub. One would mean loner. Two could potentially mean gay. So they always have 3 blokes.
And another: next time you see an ad for a country's tourism, note that they always have someone taking a golf swing.
TS, yes, I read that decades ago, two blokes would be gay, and four blokes would be two gay couples.
But beer and cider adverts are quite enjoyable on the whole. Unlike adverts for wines or spirits which are a whole load of pretentious shite.
Tourism adverts are also a whole load of excatly-the-same-ness, I find them a real turn-off.
"Taking the value of your time and hassle into account, their convenience stores are not more expensive. Or else nobody would shop there".
As I pointed out to an colleague during a discussion on this point recently, I explained that given the option - as a non car owning person - of discovering at 9 pm that I had run out of certain essentials given the available options of (1) Bus to local burg boasting "24 hour supermarket" and Bus back, or (2) slow amble to local "metro" type store and paying slightly over the odds, I would invariably go for option 2. because the extra I would fork over paying the "metro price" would be far less than paying the bus fares. My colleagues retort that being slightly more on the ball, keeping track of these things and making sure I realised I was running low on essentials before the local "proper" supermarket was closed did, I agreed, have some merit, and that if we all did that then "convenience stores" would lose their USP.
BE, yes, this ties in exactly with the motorway services prices article. It is the same thing.
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