What Is the Price Elasticity of Demand for the NFL Network?

Gregg Easterbrook of ESPN knows. It’s greater than one (in absolute value):

The NFL’s insistence on asking too much for its channel is yet another example of how often big business, with zillions of dollars in executive-suite and economic-consultant spending, nevertheless acts as if it’s ignorant of basic economics. To increase revenues, cut prices; this raises demand. (A high price suppresses demand.)

No, Gregg. If you cut prices, that will lead to an increase in the quantity demanded, not demand; if you cut prices, you move downward along the demand curve, you don’t shift it.

And whether that will lead to an increase in the revenues for the firm depends on the price elasticity of demand. And it is not at all clear that the price elasticity of demand for NFL Network is greater than one.

IQ Test?

Alex sent me this test. Someone claims it is used for job applicants in Japan.



My younger son, Adam Smith Palmer, got everyone across the river right away. Good thing, since he and his wife would like to work in Japan some day.



I looked at it and quit. I think that means my IQ is zero.

Vocabulary Test

Creating and enforcing property rights and removing impediments to the growth of a working market economy will do much more to help feed the hungry than sending ten or a thousand or a million grains of rice to starving people. So while I am not terribly keen on the underlying plan at this site, the vocabulary test is one heck of a challenge.



A few times I managed to run my score up to 47 with a series of lucky guesses, but I admit it was luck (with probably some residual influence from my high school Latin class 68 years ago plus what little I have managed to pick up from doing the crosswords with Ms. Eclectic over the past two decades). Here is the link [h/t to Alex]. My “natural” score, toward which I seem to tend, is about 43 or 44.

Vocabulary Test

Creating and enforcing property rights and removing impediments to the growth of a working market economy will do much more to help feed the hungry than sending ten or a thousand or a million grains of rice to starving people. So while I am not terribly keen on the underlying plan at this site, the vocabulary test is one heck of a challenge.



A few times I managed to run my score up to 47 with a series of lucky guesses, but I admit it was luck (with probably some residual influence from my high school Latin class 68 years ago plus what little I have managed to pick up from doing the crosswords with Ms. Eclectic over the past two decades). Here is the link [h/t to Alex]. My “natural” score, toward which I seem to tend, is about 43 or 44.

Vocabulary Test

Creating and enforcing property rights and removing impediments to the growth of a working market economy will do much more to help feed the hungry than sending ten or a thousand or a million grains of rice to starving people. So while I am not terribly keen on the underlying plan at this site, the vocabulary test is one heck of a challenge.



A few times I managed to run my score up to 47 with a series of lucky guesses, but I admit it was luck (with probably some residual influence from my high school Latin class 68 years ago plus what little I have managed to pick up from doing the crosswords with Ms. Eclectic over the past two decades). Here is the link [h/t to Alex]. My “natural” score, toward which I seem to tend, is about 43 or 44.

Securitize Your Wedding

Charlie Cooper at the Chicago Graduate School of Business suggests that it should be possible to package all the liabilities one incurs with a wedding and sell them to the guests:

My thought was this… we could add all our liabilities to together, split them up into shares and sell them to the guests. The end result being that all caterers, photographers, servers, florists etc. get paid and all guests feel as though they contributed to the wedding, as though they bought us a gift. The wedding could become self financing. It even would have returns to scale, the more people we invited, the bigger the wedding we could have. This is instead of traditional wedding financing which follows that the more people invited invariably incurs more cost. The guests are buyers and the service providers are sellers. All parties are left having purchased something that they find worth their money. The market is again clearing. And not at the NYSE, a technologically enhanced trading floor, but all this trading takes place over bourbon-on-the-rocks with poor Aretha Franklin cover music playing in the background. What could be better?



If we tranched it the right way, for her $150 wedding gift Aunt Betty would get a share of our nuptials worth 1/66th of the florist and 3/73rd of the photographer. For $75.00, Cousin Andy, who under traditional wedding market rules would have given to us our gravy boat, now gets to purchase 4% of the band, 2 steak dinners and 1/10th of the shrimp display. The tranching allows everyone to feel as though s/he gave us a gift and the gift givers get the added benefit of enjoying what they purchased. Ordinarily, cousin Andy would not get to eat out of the gravy boat he purchased whereas now, he gets utility from eating and listening to his own gift.



I present Collateralized Wedding Obligations: a type of asset-backed security and structured gift bearing product. CWOs gain exposure to a portfolio of wedding liabilities used to fund a glorious celebration of love and divide the burden among different tranches: senior tranches (immediate family and lifelong friends), mezzanine tranches (college friends), and equity tranches (the neighbor your mom said you had to invite).



The guests all get to buy gifts. The service providers all make a living. The bride and groom get married without debt. Families are not burdened. I don’t end up with stuff I won’t ever use. The payments of one party pay the liabilities of the other party. If I could only find a way to collect fees…

A Dated Item That Bears Repeating: Look at Nitrous Oxide

Ethanol made from Rapeseed (or Canola) or maize (aka corn in the US) creates more greenhouse gases than gasoline. From the UKTimes [h/t to Brian Ferguson],

Measurements of emissions from the burning of biofuels derived from rapeseed and maize have been found to produce more greenhouse gas emissions than they save. …



Rapeseed and maize biodiesels were calculated to produce up to 70 per cent and 50 per cent more greenhouse gases respectively than fossil fuels. The concerns were raised over the levels of emissions of nitrous oxide, which is 296 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Scientists found that the use of biofuels released twice as much as nitrous oxide as previously realised. The research team found that 3 to 5 per cent of the nitrogen in fertiliser was converted and emitted. In contrast, the figure used by the International Panel on Climate Change, which assesses the extent and impact of man-made global warming, was 2 per cent. The findings illustrated the importance, the researchers said, of ensuring that measures designed to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions are assessed thoroughly before being hailed as a solution. …



Maize for ethanol is the prime crop for biofuel in the US where production for the industry has recently overtaken the use of the plant as a food. In Europe the main crop is rapeseed, which accounts for 80 per cent of biofuel production.



Professor Smith told Chemistry World: “The significance of it is that the supposed benefits of biofuels are even more disputable than had been thought hitherto.”



It was accepted by the scientists that other factors, such as the use of fossil fuels to produce fertiliser, have yet to be fully analysed for their impact on overall figures. But they concluded that the biofuels “can contribute as much or more to global warming by N2 O emissions than cooling by fossil-fuel savings”.



The research is published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, where it has been placed for open review.

A Dated Item That Bears Repeating: Look at Nitrous Oxide

Ethanol made from Rapeseed (or Canola) or maize (aka corn in the US) creates more greenhouse gases than gasoline. From the UKTimes [h/t to Brian Ferguson],

Measurements of emissions from the burning of biofuels derived from rapeseed and maize have been found to produce more greenhouse gas emissions than they save. …



Rapeseed and maize biodiesels were calculated to produce up to 70 per cent and 50 per cent more greenhouse gases respectively than fossil fuels. The concerns were raised over the levels of emissions of nitrous oxide, which is 296 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Scientists found that the use of biofuels released twice as much as nitrous oxide as previously realised. The research team found that 3 to 5 per cent of the nitrogen in fertiliser was converted and emitted. In contrast, the figure used by the International Panel on Climate Change, which assesses the extent and impact of man-made global warming, was 2 per cent. The findings illustrated the importance, the researchers said, of ensuring that measures designed to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions are assessed thoroughly before being hailed as a solution. …



Maize for ethanol is the prime crop for biofuel in the US where production for the industry has recently overtaken the use of the plant as a food. In Europe the main crop is rapeseed, which accounts for 80 per cent of biofuel production.



Professor Smith told Chemistry World: “The significance of it is that the supposed benefits of biofuels are even more disputable than had been thought hitherto.”



It was accepted by the scientists that other factors, such as the use of fossil fuels to produce fertiliser, have yet to be fully analysed for their impact on overall figures. But they concluded that the biofuels “can contribute as much or more to global warming by N2 O emissions than cooling by fossil-fuel savings”.



The research is published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, where it has been placed for open review.

A Dated Item That Bears Repeating: Look at Nitrous Oxide

Ethanol made from Rapeseed (or Canola) or maize (aka corn in the US) creates more greenhouse gases than gasoline. From the UKTimes [h/t to Brian Ferguson],

Measurements of emissions from the burning of biofuels derived from rapeseed and maize have been found to produce more greenhouse gas emissions than they save. …



Rapeseed and maize biodiesels were calculated to produce up to 70 per cent and 50 per cent more greenhouse gases respectively than fossil fuels. The concerns were raised over the levels of emissions of nitrous oxide, which is 296 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Scientists found that the use of biofuels released twice as much as nitrous oxide as previously realised. The research team found that 3 to 5 per cent of the nitrogen in fertiliser was converted and emitted. In contrast, the figure used by the International Panel on Climate Change, which assesses the extent and impact of man-made global warming, was 2 per cent. The findings illustrated the importance, the researchers said, of ensuring that measures designed to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions are assessed thoroughly before being hailed as a solution. …



Maize for ethanol is the prime crop for biofuel in the US where production for the industry has recently overtaken the use of the plant as a food. In Europe the main crop is rapeseed, which accounts for 80 per cent of biofuel production.



Professor Smith told Chemistry World: “The significance of it is that the supposed benefits of biofuels are even more disputable than had been thought hitherto.”



It was accepted by the scientists that other factors, such as the use of fossil fuels to produce fertiliser, have yet to be fully analysed for their impact on overall figures. But they concluded that the biofuels “can contribute as much or more to global warming by N2 O emissions than cooling by fossil-fuel savings”.



The research is published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, where it has been placed for open review.

Property Rights: The Salvation of the Pilgrims

Every year, Carolyn Baum publishes a column (likely this year to appear here) that points out the real reason for US Thanksgiving: the institution of property rights by the Governor of the Pilgrim colony and the ensuing explosion in output. Here is an excerpt from her column as it appeared last year.

Their first winters after they landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620 and established the Plymouth Bay Colony were harsh. The weather and crop yields were poor.



Half the Pilgrims died or returned to England in the first year. Those who remained went hungry. Despite their deep religious convictions, the Pilgrims took to stealing from one another.



Finally, in the spring of 1623, Governor Bradford and the others “begane to thinke how they might raise as much corne as they could, and obtaine a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery,” according to Bradford’s History.



Old-World Baggage



One of the traditions the Pilgrims had brought with them from England was a practice known as “farming in common.” Everything they produced was put into a common pool; the harvest was rationed among them according to need. [EE: sounds pretty Marxist to me]



They had thought “that the taking away of property, and bringing in community into a common wealth, would make them happy and flourishing,” Bradford recounts.



They were wrong. “For this community (so far as it was) was found to breed much confusion and discontent, and retard much imployment that would have been to their benefite and comforte,” Bradford writes.



Young, able-bodied men resented working for others without compensation. They thought it an “injuestice” to receive the same allotment of food and clothing as those who didn’t pull their weight. What they lacked were proper incentives.



A New Way



After the Pilgrims had endured near-starvation for three winters, Bradford decided to experiment when it came time to plant in the spring of 1623. He set aside a plot of land for each family, that “they should set corne every man for his owne perticuler, and in that regard trust to themselves.”



The results were nothing short of miraculous.



Bradford writes: “This had very good success; for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corne was planted than other waise would have bene by any means the Govr or any other could use, and saved him a great deall of trouble, and gave far better content.”



The women now went willingly into the field, carrying their young children on their backs. Those who previously claimed they were too old or ill to work embraced the idea of private property and enjoyed the fruits of their labor, eventually producing enough to trade their excess corn for furs and other desired commodities.