Pricing the Atlantic

A WSJ article by Alexandra Bruell reports that three years ago the Atlantic magazine ran a $20 million deficit which led to layoffs. A new boss, Nick Thompson, was tasked with turning this around. Along with editorial changes toward longer investigative pieces rather than breaking news, the Atlantic raised subscription prices 50%. How did he know to do this?

Thompson’s team ran experiments to determine the best way to charge more without alienating new readers. It is offering fewer stories free and no longer discounting subscriptions. Last year, it raised prices for annual subscriptions to $80 from $60 for digital and to $90 from $70 for both print and digital.

Revenue was up 10% last year to close to $100 million and the magazine is now profitable.

What makes people happy?

Economist: Four main factors, explain happiness: 

• Age: Things go downhill from youth to middle age until they reach a nadir commonly known as the mid-life crisis. ... . [Then as people lose] ... vitality, mental sharpness and looks, they also gain what people spend their lives pursuing: happiness.
• Gender: Women, by and large, are slightly happier than men. But they are also more susceptible to depression: a fifth to a quarter of women experience depression at some point in their lives, compared with around a tenth of men. 
• Personality: Neurotic people—those who are prone to guilt, anger and anxiety—tend to be unhappy. ... Whereas neuroticism tends to make for gloomy types, extroversion does the opposite.
• Circumstances: Married, employed, childless, and richer people are happier

Spotify's Complements?

 

Anne Steele at the WSJ reports that Spotify is the leading audio-streaming platform with 600 million users and a 30% market share. Even so, it seems to be struggling. After a couple of rounds of layoffs, some false starts from expansion into podcasting, concert promotion, and audio books, it earned its first quarterly profits since 2022 in the last quarter of 2023. Competition with tech giants Apple, Amazon, and Google have kept margins low - for every dollar it earns on music streaming, it pays $0.70 in royalties.

But its tech giant competitors do not have to earn profits on streaming music. Their other services can be complementary to audio-streaming. For example, Apple would be happy if Apple Music operated at a loss so long as it helped to sell more high-margin iPhones. This is exactly what Netscape complained about in the late 1990s when Microsoft gave the Internet Explorer away for free. Netscape's revenue model was based on the sales of the browser. Microsoft's was based on sales of operating systems. So long as a free browser sold more computers with Windows already preinstalled, Microsoft was happy. How could Netscape compete with free? How can Spotify compete with subsidized competitors?

Steele hints at this problem by suggesting that Spotify could be a takeover target for companies like Microsoft, Netflix, or Tencent. These companies all have services that could be complements for music streaming. They might be willing to subsidize Spotify if doing so sells more operating systems, movies, or video games.

Keeping you from Cutting your Finger Off

The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) is considering mandating SawStop technology on future table saws. Ben Blatt at The Age does a good job of laying out the issues and providing some numbers. The technology to drop the blade out of harm's way within a few milliseconds is amazing (see video). My table saw is the scariest piece of equipment in this woodworker's shop. 

Let's see if this mandate might be worth it. The article in The Age reports that table saws cause 4,300 amputations every year, more than thousands of other products combined. Almost all of these will be fingers. Maximum workers compensation values for a lost finger range from 20 weeks of pay (a pinky) to 45 weeks (an index finger). The average carpenter's compensation is $63,149 per year or $1,214 per week. This means that if all amputations were prevented a maximum value of the savings would be $24,288-$54,648 per accident, or about $104-$234 million in aggregate. 

The Age also reports that 675,000 table saws are purchased in the US and that the CPSC estimates that the technology would add $338 to $1,210 in costs per table saw. This implies total cost increases of $228-$817 million. So the costs of the mandate are two to three times the maximum benefit.

But it is worse than this. A mandate eliminates choice. SawStop is already available on the market but only has a 2% market share. Those who value this technology can purchase it. Those who place a lower value on it can choose not to. The mandate implies that the government knows better than the 98% of practicing woodworkers and carpenters who have opted out. This little back-of-the-envelope calculation confirms my own decision not to purchase a SawStop. This may be a case for more information disclosure rather than a product mandate.

Do the Rich Pay their Fair Share of Income Taxes?

WSJ :

•  The top 1% of earners in 2021 provided 45.8% of tax revenue;  
•  the top 10% provided 75.8%; 
•  the bottom 50% provided 2.3%. 

 The obvious justification for this kind of inequality is incentives.  If we pay people who create more wealth more, we get more wealth. 

  Claude.ai: 

•  Denmark: The top 10% of income earners in Denmark pay around 28% of all Danish income tax revenue collected. However, Denmark has very high income tax rates across the board compared to the US, with even average earners paying around 36-37% in income taxes. 
•  China: vIncome inequality is high in China, with the top 10% earning around 41% of total national income as of 2015. However, taxes on high incomes in China are relatively low compared to Western nations. The top marginal income tax rate is only 45%. 
• France: the top 10% of income earners pay around 70% of all income tax revenue. 
• Germany: the top 10% pay about 55% of all income tax. 
• UK: the top 10% contribute around 60% of income tax revenue. 
• Sweden, despite high taxes overall, only around 27% of income taxes come from the top 10% of earners due to a more even income distribution. 

So while the exact percentages vary, it is common across developed nations for a relatively small percentage of top earners to contribute a disproportionately large share of total income tax revenues due to progressive tax rate structures. Denmark's flatter overall tax system leads to more evenly distributed tax contributions across incomes.

Music Backed Securities

 

Due to music streaming, many musicians can expect steady royalty streaming. The WSJ has a video that explains how this future income is increasingly being capitalized and securitized. This way, the artist has access to the cash now instead of waiting for the streams to materialize.

FTC vs. Amazon: If there is no solution (remedy), there is no problem (liability)

The FTC asked a Washington court to split its monopolization case against Amazon (earlier blog post) in two: 1. to determine whether Amazon has a monopoly (liability), and then 2. what to do about it (remedy). 

Their argument (not yet posted) likely would be that bifurcation is more efficient because if FTC loses on liability, there would be no need for a remedy trial.  But if the FTC has to litigate both at once, it would change the trial.  The FTC would have to answer the questions "what should they have done differently?"  and "why is the choice they made bad for competition?"  The burden of answering it would fall on the FTC, and its economic expert. 

For example, suppose that the FTC thinks that the source of Amazon's market power is the integration of its fulfillment network with its electronic marketplace, and proposes a remedy to force divestiture of the two.  An economic witness would be forced to admit that divested companies may not perform as well as the integrated one (See Chapters 22, 23), e.g., by creating a double markup problem, or by foregoing some other economy of integration. 

The Dept of Justice brought (I was Chief Economist then), and then lost, the ATT/TimeWarner vertical merger challenge, in part because it could not overcome this burden of proof.

SOME RELATED ACADEMIC WORK:

• Willem H. Boshoff, Luke M. Froeb, Wihan Marais, Roan J. Minnie, Steven Tschantz. Bargaining Competition and Vertical Mergers: The Problem of Model Selection, Review of Industrial Organization (SSRN). 
• Cooper, James, Luke Froeb, Daniel O'Brien, and Michael Vita, Vertical Antitrust Policy as a Problem of Inference, International Journal of Industrial Organization, 23 (2005) 639–664. (SSRN)
• Comment by Frederick Scherer (2005) 
• Comment by Ralph Winter (2005) 
• Reply by authors (2006) 
• Rejoinder by Ralph Winter (2006)

TRUTH IN BLOGGING: I have done consulting work for Amazon.

Post will be updated as information becomes available.  

Would that the EU were as fast at innovating as they are at regulating

 Link:  The European Parliament approved the AI Act, which raises the cost of European innovation.

➵ High-risk AI systems will be assessed before being put on the market and also throughout their lifecycle. People will have the right to file complaints about AI systems to designated national authorities. ➵ Generative AI, like ChatGPT, will not be classified as high-risk but will have to comply with transparency requirements and EU copyright law.

➵ Fines for non-compliance can be up to 35 million Euros or 7% of worldwide annual turnover.

Americans favor SUV's over the environment, ...

...because they are exempt from fuel economy standards:

Because making light trucks held to lower environmental standards was more profitable than building small clean cars, automakers marketed big models, including suvs, enthusiastically. They portrayed them as quintessentially American, embodying freedom, strength and adventurousness. By 2002 light trucks made up a bigger share of light-duty vehicle sales than cars. After the price shock of the 1970s, by the 1990s petrol had become cheaper in America than in other rich countries—so the cost of running a big car did not deter buyers. Such models are convenient for suburban living, and consumers see them as safe. (The Economist)

This is an example of what economists call "revealed preference."  You don't have to ask people whether they care about the environment; instead you infer their preferences from how they behave.   

It is also an example of "incentive misalignment" from Chapter 1.  If we want people to drive more fuel efficient cars, we have to stop penalizing them for doing so.  

Why did Chocolate become so expensive?

 

From The Economist:

Carla Subirana Artus explains that severe drought and diseases, driven by extreme weather, together with regulatory pressures have created the perfect storm for the cocoa industry.

In other words, supply declined.