Four poor kids from Liverpool formed a band and became the greatest rock group of all time. And they made a lot of money. Although most musicians make their big money on tour, the Beatles have not performed live since 1966. Two of its members are dead, so there won’t be a reunion tour (although that hasn’t stopped Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey).
But the money rolls in, and for all of the members or their heirs. To celebrate the release of The Beatles: Rock Band and the release of remastered and mono boxed sets of the Beatles’ albums, this week’s Numberscruncher will look at some of the band’s money matters.
Musicians are paid several ways. They are paid for their professional services whenever they perform, which is why touring can be a good deal for a band with a loyal fan base. For a recorded performance, the artist may have received a one-time fee or may be eligible for a royalty from each sale or play. Then, if they wrote the song, they receive a payment for the use of it, whether when performed by the band or by someone else. That songwriting royalty is split in half, with a share going to the songwriter and another share going to the publishing company that handles the licensing and distribution of the song and the sheet music. Publishing involves a lot of clerical and administrative work that most musicians are not interested in doing, so the separation makes sense. (more…)
I hate corporate jargon at least as much as the next person, and “Think Win-Win!” is one of many good reasons to be self-employed. Still, it represents an interesting idea: how do we find solutions to problems that make everyone better off? To too many managers, the phrase means “I’m going to screw you but will try to convince you that you are now better off”, but that doesn’t mean it never happens.
Economics is the study of how to satisfy infinite wants with finite resources. Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist who died in 1923, was interested in exposing flaws in the Italian government. He found that about 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the people. Furthermore, he found that in almost every society, a small percentage of the people have the bulk of the wealth. The exact proportion could vary; in some places, 20% of the people held 80% of the wealth, and in some places, 5% of the people held 95% of it. Pareto developed equations to explain the phenomenon, which look scary (you can take a gander on the Wikipedia page.) The explanation is easier: every time you increase the amount of an item in a distribution, whether it be wealth, population, or catastrophic accidents, its frequency will decline by a set proportion. Hence, fewer people are wealthier than poor, fewer cities have large populations than small populations, expensive car accidents are less common than fender-benders. This is the genesis of the so-called “80-20 rule” that is almost as beloved by managers as “think win-win!”
Pareto then theorized that the problem with this distribution is that no one can be made better off without someone being worse off. That, he said, was why poverty is intractable. To improve the lot of the 80% of the people without wealth, those who have it would have to give some up, and they wouldn’t like that. Economists say that this type of distribution is “Pareto optimal”. It may not be optimal for society, of course, but hey, there is no free lunch. (Economists like to say that a lot, too.) (more…)
The New York Times Magazine ran an article on a sad and chronic problem in the developing world: the preference people have for sons over daughters, and the lengths they will go to in order to ensure that they have sons. The scary part is that the situation is made worse, not better, by improved living standards. Newly affluent and educated Indians can pay for ultrasounds to determine a fetus’s gender, and then have a safe abortion if it is a girl – much less messy than drowning a newborn! These emerging middle-class families feel pressure to ensure that their sons have good educations and medical care, and they figure that a suitable marriage for a daughter will involve a high dowry. Even though the family’s resources may be growing, the boy will need to take a larger share of them. There simply won’t be enough for some pathetic creature cursed with two X chromosomes.
The ridiculousness of parents who would love a child less – to the point of murder – because of secondary sex characteristics is bad enough. But there’s an additional reason to fear gender selection: what to do with the excess men. This is a new phenomenon in human history. For most of our eons of existence, humans have suffered from a shortage of men. Male babies tend to be weaker, and then men would die while hunting or during wars. That’s why human beings took up polygamy. It was purely practical: a man would take in the nice widow lady a few caves down as a way of supporting the community as a whole. Naturally, the rich men would end up with more, younger, and prettier wives than the average fellow, but the surplus of women meant that there were wives for every man who wanted one, or two, or three. (more…)
The debate about health care reform has more irony than a vintage issue of Might magazine. To start, notice how no one is talking about dismantling or privatizing Medicare? That’s because Medicare is way too popular to mess with.
My parents love Medicare; my father was the executive director of a regional trade organization and had a hard time securing health insurance at a reasonable price because there were so few employees and because my mother survived cancer. No matter what doctors or medical researchers say, insurance companies do not believe that it is possible for someone to be cured of cancer. Premiums for a cancer survivor are high, and many insurance companies refuse to write individual or small group plans if a cancer survivor is in the group. My mother’s 65th birthday was a huge relief to my parents, because she could finally get health insurance.
My husband loves Medicare, too. He handles affairs for one of his grandmothers, and the health insurance part is easy. She sees a doctor, the bill gets paid, and my husband receives a notice. As opposed to health care for our healthy 11-year-old child, insurance for an elderly woman with diabetes is handled with no patient explanations that our coverage is through Blue Cross of California’s out-of-state plan, not Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois, and the information is on the card, so please check your files and resubmit the bill; no fights over whether the vaccine falls under the pharmaceutical benefit or an office procedure and thus whether it is covered by the co-charged against the deductible; no worries about whether the doctor is in-network at the city location and the suburban location or just at the city one. Under Medicare, the very little paperwork moves from place to place and culminates in a check for the doctor. Hurray! (more…)
As the good folks in Washington sort through the financial crisis, they want to know what happened and how to prevent it from happening again. What happened is that public choice economics proved to work flawlessly while other theories, about free and efficient markets, fell down on the job. So what is this public choice theory?
It’s a theory dreamed up by James Buchanan, a professor at George Mason University. He won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1986 for “for his development of the contractual and constitutional bases for the theory of economic and political decision-making”. Â In simpler terms, he figured out exactly how money and influence work in our political system. His theory, known as public choice, says that those who have a key stake in particular legislation lobby hard for the change they want; the rest of us make the rational decision not to get involved because we really don’t have the time or energy to worry about something like safety considerations for hospital-based x-ray facilities.
Now, of course, we the people have weird issues that will get our dander up. For some, it’s broad things like health insurance reform, but they can also be tiny. Like here’s one: I’m a member of the CFA Institute, and the organization has lobbied hard so that members can be excused from different licensing requirements. To people in the investment business, it’s a huge incentive to taking the CFA exam and paying membership dues. Does anyone else even care? Is it a matter for huge public debate? Probably not. All of these special cases add up and create a system where business regulations are hard to fathom, the tax laws are a mystery, and no one knows what to do when things go wrong. However, those with money and influence know how to work the system to get what they want. (more…)
The name Zachary Mexico is a pseudonym. And most of the people he interviews in the story also are pseudonymous. They have an excuse, too:  China is a communist nation. Its official ideology demands fealty to the state, so telling an American author about sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll might get a citizen into a goodly bit of trouble. For that matter, the American author who took down the stories might not be able to get a visa to get back into China.
Mexico studied in China in college, and he missed the country. He went back in 2006 to find out what was happening for himself. He finds a place where everything is new and everything is dangerous.
China is overcoming centuries of poverty and decades of terrible government. Change is not easy, even if it happens peacefully. Mexico writes about people who aren’t sure what to do in a world that’s changing. Some people stay up all night playing murder mystery games, others consume a ridiculous amount of drugs (often purchased from illegal immigrants hailing from Nigeria). Others are just confused about the differences between the image of China that they grew up with and the modern reality. The Chinese are feeling their way into a capitalist world, and they are dealing with international partners who have more experience with capitalism but that are not necessarily more sophisticated. (more…)
Usually, tales of Greek houses gone bad fall into two categories: drugs and alcohol, or hazing. The undergraduate members screw up; the old people from the national office kick them out; and then the chapter reforms five years later after the misdeeds are but a hazy memory. The national officers are, by definition, college educated adults, and they are supposed to exemplify the Greek Letter Organization’s ideals of model citizenship, so they don’t screw up much. That’s not to say that they never do, such as when the national officers of Delta Zeta sororitydecided to kick out the members of the chapter at DePauw University in order to find new pledges who would seem prettier and more sociable. How were those ladies from national to know that the members would get upset and call in the press?
Last week, several members of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority filed suit against its former national president, Barbara McKinzie, alleging financial misdeeds including commissioning a wax statue of herself. Alpha Kappa Alpha is the oldest Greek organization established by African-American women. It was founded in 1908, close enough to the abolition of slavery that the very idea of the children or grandchildren of slaves attending college was novel. (more…)
The health-care crisis and the financial crisis have a problem in common, which is how the government can regulate those markets to make things better, not worse.
Regulatory theory forms an interesting intersection of business, law, political science, and philosophy. Â Do you give people incentives to do the right thing or punishments for doing the wrong thing? And what is the right thing, anyway? In health care, is our priority access to basic care or access to high technology? Do we care more about cost or about quality?
The libertarian argument is that the market will take of allocating resources. If there is an opportunity, a product will arise to meet it; if there is inefficiency, competition will eliminate it. If everyone acts in his or her own best interest, eventually the interests of society will be served as well. It’s a lovely theory, and it sometimes works in practice. But not always. At an extreme, the libertarian argument would say that doctors do not need to be regulated because once everyone knows who the bad doctors are, they won’t go to them anymore. Unfortunately, a few people may die needlessly before that happens. (more…)
Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported on the exaggerations and assumptions required to make the claim that Michael Jackson sold 750 million albums. He sold a lot of albums, but probably nowhere near 750 million, and not just because of those meddling kids with their cassette dubs and their file sharing. It’s simply that fuzzy numbers are everywhere. They’re a function of good-faith estimation, spotty data, and outright lies.
Numbers frighten people, but they really shouldn’t — they’re just as subjective as anything else. They look like they’re the result of precise calculation, but often they’re invented as a way to put an aura of precision on someone’s opinion.
Sometimes a number comes from deduction rather than data collection, with a result that’s reasonable, logical — and completely made up. There’s a type of job-interview question commonly used by consulting firms called the case interview, where the interviewer throws the candidate a question to see how he or she approaches the problem. A simple example might be something like “How many pencils are purchased in the United States each year?” The candidate is expected to deduce an answer: “Well, there are 330 million people, and let’s assume that everyone uses at least one pencil a year. But some people go through more. Elementary school children only use pencils, and let’s say they make up 10 percent of the population and use 12 pencils a year. Some adults prefer to use only pencils, too — let’s make that another 10 percent. Then we’ll assume that 5 percent of the population either bowls or plays golf and uses those little half pencils, so we’ll say another 12 per year. So that’s 25 percent of 330 million using 12 per year, and 75 percent using only 1 per year, so the answer is: 990,000,000 + 247,500,000 = 1,237,500,000 pencils.”
Alsip isn’t the leafy, angsty Chicago suburb of a John Hughes movie. If people know about it, it’s probably because they have been to a wedding at the Chateau Bu-Sche’.  One reason that few people live in Alsip is that it is surrounded by cemeteries: Holy Sepulchre. Chapel Hills. Hazel Green. St. Casimir’s. Oak Hill. And, of course, Burr Oak. Burr Oak Cemetery was supposed to be the final resting place for generations of African-Americans from Chicago, but it has turned into one of the oddest, and most pathetic, scandals in the odd, scandal-ridden death care industry.
At Burr Oak, it is alleged, the cemetery manager and three of the people on staff would dig up bodies, dump them out back, then re-sell the plots for new burials. They accepted cash, the medium of trade beloved of cheapskates and crooks alike, preying on families that were upset and just wanted to honor their deceased relative with a burial at an historic cemetery.
Most cultures and religions have a list of requirements for handling the dead, designed to ensure their passage into the next world or to keep the family and friends occupied, out of bed, and interacting with the community during a dark time in their lives. Whether you prefer the theological or the sociological interpretation, there are rules that everyone in a respectful society should honor. And, there are legitimate public health reasons for having dead bodies burned or buried in a few days’ time. (more…)
The New York Times Magazine ran an article on a sad and chronic problem in the developing world: ![your_health__medicare.Par.15273.Image.0.0.1[1]](http://popdose.com/wp-content/uploads/your_health__medicare.Par.15273.Image.0.0.11.jpg "your_health__medicare.Par.15273.Image.0.0.1[1]")
The debate about health care reform has more irony than a vintage issue of Might magazine. To start, notice how no one is talking about dismantling or privatizing Medicare? That’s because Medicare is way too popular to mess with.
Zachary Mexico – China Underground (2009, Soft Skull)
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Alsip isn’t the leafy, angsty Chicago suburb of a John Hughes movie. If people know about it, it’s probably because they have been to a wedding at the 