2013 study timely after big week for media: Criticism of press performance, respect for role.http://t.co/aM9g8zTIDV pic.twitter.com/PeO3R6LKCq
— Carroll Doherty (@CarrollDoherty) February 13, 2015
Media bias versus media vigilance
17 Feb 2015 Leave a comment
in economics of media and culture, industrial organisation, survivor principle Tags: media bias
Economics as Incredulity : Working conditions during the Industrial Revolution
16 Feb 2015 Leave a comment
The Law of Crappy Managers
14 Feb 2015 Leave a comment
in economics of bureaucracy, industrial organisation, managerial economics, occupational choice, organisational economics, personnel economics, survivor principle Tags: Peter Principle
The media market works: US media is slightly to the left of centre
12 Feb 2015 Leave a comment
in economics of media and culture, industrial organisation, politics - Australia, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA, survivor principle Tags: demand for social insurance, gender wage gap, media bias
As discussed before, to survive in a competitive market, media outlets must serve that market as best they can.
The reader or viewer that is most likely to turn off or otherwise switch to another activity are women, often mothers. Women tend to be to the left than me because of their greater demand for social insurance.
To keep their most marginal viewers, media outlets pitch their stories slightly left of centre, aimed at women who are most likely to switch off if they are not seeing what they want to see.
Union density has taken a bit of a battering in US manufacturing and construction
05 Feb 2015 Leave a comment
Why do economic consulting firms exist?
02 Feb 2015 1 Comment
in applied price theory, economics of bureaucracy, economics of information, financial economics, law and economics, managerial economics, organisational economics, survivor principle Tags: advice giving industries, corporate law, Deirdre McCloskey, directors duties, economic consultants
Directors’ duties are the reason why the companies hire economic consultants. What consultants say isn’t important; the fact that simply the directors of a company sought advice is what matters. Same goes for the public sector: you must know what you’re doing, you took advice from outside experts.
Central to avoiding being sued if the company goes broke, or otherwise gets into a spot of bother, is the directors show that they acted responsibly.
Central to this is they can show they took advice from esteemed advisers: an accountant, a lawyer and an economist. If they did so, they must be responsible prudent directors because they took advice.
Deirdre McCloskey argued that the advising industry lives off 19th century case law on directors’ and trustees’ duties.
If you take advice – from an accountant, a lawyer or an economist – and the business or investment still fails, it can’t be your fault that you lost the widow’s and orphans’s inheritance.
You took advice. That is what that 19th-century court held with regard to what directors do and do not have to do given the fact that are not involved in the business on a day to day basis.
James Burk, a sociologist and former stockbroker… found that the advice giving industry sprang from legal decisions in the early 19th century.
The courts began to decide that the trustee of the pension fund or a child’s inheritance could be held liable for bad investing if they did not take advice. The effect would have been the same had the court decided that prudent man should consult a Ouija boards or the flight of birds…
America decided through its courts than an industry giving advice on the stock market should come into existence, whether or not it was worthless.
Therefore, it doesn’t matter what you say as a consultant economist to a company, the fact you’ve said something to them is more important to them than what you are saying. Seeking and receiving your advice excused them from being sued for breach of their directors duties for a couple of days.
Peak Facebook?
01 Feb 2015 Leave a comment
in economics of media and culture, industrial organisation, survivor principle Tags: competition as a discovery procedure, creative destruction, Facebook, Serial competition, The meaning of competition
Top 100 Companies Worldwide: the Geography of Large Corporations — Information is Beautiful Awards
28 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
in economic history, industrial organisation, survivor principle
via Top 100 Companies Worldwide: the Geography of Large Corporations — Information is Beautiful Awards.
I, Smartphone
28 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, applied welfare economics, economics of media and culture, industrial organisation, survivor principle Tags: IPencil, Iphone
Based on Leonard Read’s famous essay “I, Pencil,” this short video beautifully illustrates the vast complexity that we carry in our pockets.
No one person could ever make a smartphone. It required the spontaneous cooperation of millions across all countries. The world could never be reinvented by a single mind, but rather requires the coordination of plans made possible only through private property and the price system.
HT: http://tucker.liberty.me/2015/01/27/15-great-lessons-on-commerce-and-entrepreneurship/#.VMfl-ZUvGGA.facebook
A cheat sheet of 19 different business models
28 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
in entrepreneurship, industrial organisation, managerial economics, organisational economics, survivor principle, theory of the firm Tags: entrepreneurial alertness, The meaning of competition
The Bechdel Test: whether women are in a movie as fully human characters, or as plot devices for the male characters
27 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
in discrimination, economics of media and culture, gender, industrial organisation, movies, occupational choice, survivor principle Tags: co-worker discrimination, consumer sovereignty, customer discrimination, employer discrimination, Hollywood economics, sex discrimination, The meaning of competition
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Hollywood is a slave to the box office on the most cutthroat industry there is. Film producers and screenwriters will portray men and women in whatever roles and whatever extent sells tickets.
How women are represented in the movies is determined solely by the preferences of the audiences willing to buy tickets. It’s a buyers market out there. Film producers would do whatever it takes to finance films that sell tickets, as even Five Thirty-Eight realised:
“Movies that are female-driven do not travel,” said Krista Smith, West Coast editor of Vanity Fair, describing the broader sentiment in Hollywood. There are almost no women who have sales value in multiple international territories, maybe with the exception of Sandra Bullock, she said.
Times change, and film producers change with the times. Consumers are both sovereign and change their minds, and in the case of movie audiences, constantly demand novelty and surprises, as even Five Thirty-Eight picked up on:
Hollywood is the business of making money. Since our data demonstrates that films containing meaningful interactions between women do better at the box office than movies that don’t, it may be only a matter of time before the data of dollars and cents overcomes the rumours and prejudices defining the budgeting process of films for, by and about women.
This moral panic over gender wage gaps between millionaire actresses and actresses dare not say that for want of offending the audience that is actually the main driver of any gender gap in movies.
Hollywood activists complaining about the gender wage are to business minded to dare insult the audiences that pay their wages.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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