Another gem:
“…54 percent of households had no credit card debt after paying their monthly bill and that the average household credit card debt was just over $2,300.”
Category: Economics
China Restates Earnings
Kiedel’s article put a number of things into perspective for me – namely why I hear ‘China, China, China’ everywhere I go (like I heard ‘India, India, India’ a couple years back) – China is trying damn hard to pull itself out of poverty.
With the restated numbers, more than 500 million Chinese1 live below the dollar-a-day poverty line.
Makes me want to give them a hand and outsource something to them.
Thanks to Angus @ Kids Prefer Cheese
1. 37% of China’s population. As a reference point, the entire US population is a hair over 300 million with 12% in poverty .
Local-Ownership Arguments Loco
“If the small operations want to stay in business… they have to innovate.” – Wolfgang Puck
I’m with Puck, I don’t buy the argument that big national operations take money from smaller locally-owned operations. If anything, big name presence is proof a viable, stable market exists. Would it be better if Puck didn’t have a presence here and wasn’t pushing for locally grown food sources? No.
Should we all eat at Buffalo Wild Wings instead, simply because it’s headquartered here?
The premise that shopping at a national operation isn’t shopping local is bizarre for a number of reasons:
- The people working there live locally.
- Much of the business’s income needs to stay local to just to pay for continued presence (rent, marketing, salaries, utilities).
- And in the case of 20.21, the food itself is regional if not local.
Now, flip the argument around – Minnesota is home to many national brands (Target, 3M) – are we going to stop giving them money because they have locations elsewhere?
No, that makes no sense. In the same way the trade deficit doesn’t make sense.
When Do We Throw It All Away?
First off, I’m all for minimizing landfills and maximixing the use of our resources. But, I’ve been thinking more and more about the economics of ‘recycling’ since listening to Mike Munger on EconTalk in July.
Right at the start of the podcast, Munger asks,
“I have something in my hand, I want you to guess, is it a resource or is it garbage?”
Surprising, it’s a pretty straight-forward answer,
“Would someone pay you for it or can you make something from it that’s higher value?”
Hmmmm.
Every month we pay someone to haul off our garbage in one truck and our ‘recycling’ in another. We’re not paid as the second truck drives by. Plus, the reason the items are on the curb to being with is that I’m done with them.
Earlier this autumn, when our kitchen was demo-ed, the contractor set a number of the old metal pieces aside the dumpster. After sitting there for a few days, a single beat-up pickup truck rolled by real slow, and a kid – no more than 14 – jumped out, quickly sorted throw the metal, threw a couple pieces in the truck and hopped back in.
If there was a market for ‘recycling’, I imagine we’d see lots of trucks competiting for whatever’s in my orange and green bin every other Tuesday.
Instead, metal, glass, plastic, and paper go into the same bucket (“single-sort”) and transported by one of only 3 vendors to an amazing $3 million machine sorting through everything. Salvaged materials transported to mills and ‘spoilage’ transported to incinerators 1.
I don’t know about the exact margins in all those transactions, but they feel pretty tight – especially considering all the transportation involved.
In addition, there doesn’t seem to be a strong push by my waste vendor or the city for making sure what goes in the single-sort bins are actually ‘recycleable’. No weekly report from the waste hauler on my compliance this month. Simply a few bullet-points encouraging me to rinse glass and cans out.
From this, I can only conclude that spending our time and clean water cleaning waste is the only way to make it valuable again. That doesn’t sound like a good deal holistically, especially with that multi-million dollar sorting robot downstream.
Makes me wonder when the costs of driving 2 trucks around will become too much and our waste haulers will take back one of their buckets leaving us to truly single-sort.
Elsewhere 13 Aug 2007
1. Assumptions I made from the details in the meeting notes from Anoka City Council Oct 3, 2005 [pdf].
Gifted
A Middle Man’s a Middle Man
Benn’s post is one of the many articles online showing how little compensation musicians receive from the business organizations that are said to be supporting them. While, it’s unfortunate that he mistakes piracy for lack of compensation, he highlights the need for an easy way to give money directly to musicians, and others who’s creative work you enjoy.
In the end, Benn admits:
“I make most of my living from licensing and composition.”
Bingo.
As you know, as much as I love writing this blog, I don’t make my living from it directly. I could….if you showered me with piles of PayPal donations.
Update 26 Jun 2007:
On the flip side, Dave Slusher describes an much needed aggregation and subscription service. Swap out mini-comics for local musicians or filmmakers and the same need exists.
Side note, as I read Dave’s post, I had a little deja vu. Always a good thing in my book.
Only Do
Why Buying Local, Frontier House, and the Trade Deficit are All Silly
Russ Roberts’ EconTalk is consistently interesting and engaging podcast covering economics as a perspective and a practice.
I spent the first half of this week listening to his hour long conversation with colleague Don Boudreaux on the economics of buying local for the sake of buying local.
Boudreaux and Roberts expand on many of the same points as Roberts’ conversation with Mike Munger on the division of labor and boil it all down to: the division of labor creates wealth. Trade is simply an extended division of labor and a trade deficit with another country is as silly a notion as having a trade deficit with another state, town, or the local grocery store.
Off Balance
At a micro level, tracking the trade deficit is like tracking a grocery imbalance with your local supermarket.