Category: Data Source

The three countries in which the [movie piracy] losses to U.S. studios were highest were not East Asian countries, and two of them were not developing countries: Mexico, the United Kingdom, and France accounted for over $1.2 billion in lost revenues, or 25% of the non-U.S. total – and slightly less than the U.S. total of $1.3 billion.

You will notice that China is not mentioned in that summary.  Go to p.13 of the paper: Russia has a per capita piracy rate lower than that of Germany and about equal to that of Japan.  And, out of the first eleven nations studied, China comes in sixth in absolute terms for movie piracy losses and eleventh in per capita terms.  In per capita terms, nation #10, Russia, has almost ten times the piracy losses as does China.  Per capita piracy losses are about twenty times higher in the United States than in China.  If eleven more nations are added to the rankings (see p.15), only two (Korea and India) have lower per capita piracy losses than China.  Overall that puts China at 20th out of 22 sampled countries when it comes to per capita piracy losses on movies. 

Hungary, however, is a major, major offender.  Chinese piracy is highly visible to those who visit major Chinese cities, because it takes the form of DVD sales in the streets.  But the real grabbers are countries where everyone has a VCR or DVD player, and where the domestic film industry is relatively weak.

These numbers may not be highly accurate, but they do put things in perspective.  Hat tip to China Law Blog.

The entire market in subprime debt is just 1.4% of the size of global equity markets. Or, to put it another way, a 1.4% downward fluctuation in stocks erases the same amount of value as if all subprime-backed bonds were collectively marked to $0.

Here is the link.

The Asian
Development Bank presented official survey results indicating China’s
economy is smaller and poorer than established estimates say. The
announcement cited the first authoritative measure of China’s size
using purchasing power parity methods. The results tell us that when
the World Bank announces its expected PPP data revisions later this
year, China’s economy will turn out to be 40 per cent smaller than
previously stated……The number of people in China living below the
World Bank’s dollar-a-day poverty line is 300m – three times larger
than currently estimated.

Here is more.

When next summer’s Olympics roll around, the Beijing Weather Modification Office will be poised to intercept incoming clouds, draining them before they get to the festivities.  No fewer than 32,000 people
nationwide are employed by the Weather Modification Office — "some of
them farmers, who are paid $100 a month to handle anti-aircraft guns and rocket launchers" loaded with cloud-seeding compounds.

Here is the story.

Or is it Europe fact of the day?  Switzerland fact of the day?

Beijing is now Europe’s largest source of manufactured imports, but the 27-nation bloc, with a population of about 470 million people, exports less to China than it does to Switzerland.

Here is the article. 

Ron Paul has now passed Fred Thompson in the probability of winning the Republican nomination.  According to Intrade, Paul has a probability of winning the nomination of 8.8%. (Guiliani (42.0%) and Romney (27.6%) are first and second.)

In closely related news, Paul raised $4.2 million yesterday.  V.

Thanks to Barry Klein and Tim Groseclose for the tips.

…there are 100 gigawatts of "illegal" electric power plants in China,
meaning plants not approved by the central government. (The entire
nation of France uses 80 gigawatts of power. China uses 650 gigawatts.)

China sentence of the day is also a citation from Arnold Kling:

China’s central government has difficulty getting its constituencies to
change, and it is "outsourcing" some forms of regulation and governance
to the U.S. and international organizations.

China essay of the day is here.

• The
  Impact of Milton Friedman on Modern Monetary Economics.  A nice review by Edward Nelson and Anna Schwartz of Friedman’s thought and influence over monetary policy that also, in the author’s words, sets the record straight on Paul Krugman’s ‘Who was Milton Friedman.’

• The world may be getting smaller but big Americans are sinking the boats at Disney’s It’s a Small World.

• The Ayn Rand Lexicon is now online.

Nada, her book, is even better, a true case of a rediscovered classic, now out in a first-rate English translation.

Joseph Newhouse and the other RAND researchers have responded to Nyman’s paper arguing that attrition bias biased their results.  The RAND researchers were aware of these issues and in fact designed the experiment to avoid incentives for non-random attrition.   Most importantly, the basic RAND findings have now been replicated in many other studies (smaller and not always experiments but the results are solid).  I call it a knockout for RAND.

It’s a credit to the many insightful commentators on Marginal Revolution that many of these points were made already in the comments on my original post.

Thanks to Jason Furman for the pointer.

Lots, at least for some:

It might be fair to have the rich pay half their income . . . but when you factor in other taxes, many of them do. My old colleagues moving to New York City from London were frequently heard to say "What is this rubbish we’ve been talking about America having low taxes? My taxes are higher here!" That’s because New York State and New York City together levy an additional income tax of 10% once your income is over $100K, which pushed two-income families above Britain’s 40% top tax bracket. A 50% tax rate on top incomes would result, for New Yorkers, in a 60% effective total income tax rate total, with their incomes further eroded by the city’s 10% sales tax. Since pretty much the entire increase in inequality in the last few decades seems to have come from a few zip codes in the high tax zones around New York and San Francisco, this matters.

There are broader lessons.  First, tax incidence is tricky.  If location is such an enormous source of economic value, will local income tax rates, and also sales tax, in fact fall on landowners in those cities?

Second, not all of these people can convert their labor income into capital gains income, which is taxed at a much lower rate.  In other words, high-earning Manhattan journalists face exorbitant rates of taxation, as do doctors without their own practices.  That’s one reason why it is becoming a city of equity holders.

Third, those who can opt for capital gains, for tax reasons, end up with more exposure to income risk than they ideally want.  Boo-hoo for the billionaires you might say, but the added risk raises income inequality for the winners who constitute the top one percent, relative to other income classes.  That doesn’t bother me much, but the policy is helping create a result it was designed to counteract.

Fourth, if you’re planning on raising marginal tax rates on the wealthy, there may be less "give" in the system than you might have thought.  This of course depends on tax incidence, but if behavioral considerations matter, many people resent nominal marginal rates of 60 percent, even if they are earning some of it back in the form of higher wages.

What’s an old person anyway?  Does it depend on how many years are behind you, or how many years you still can expect to live?  Here is John Shoven:

The current practice of measuring age as years-since-birth, both in
common practice and in the law, rather than alternative measures
reflecting a person’s stage in the lifecycle distorts important
behavior such as retirement, saving, and the discussion of dependency
ratios.  Two alternative measures of age are explored: mortality risk
and remaining life expectancy.  With these alternative measures, the
huge wave of elderly forecast for the first half of this century
doesn’t look like a huge wave at all.  By conventional 65+ standards,
the fraction of the population that is elderly will grow by about 66
percent.  However, the fraction of the population that is above a
mortality rate that corresponds to 65+ today will grow by only 20
percent.  Needless to say, the aging of the society is a lot less
dramatic with the alternative mortality-based age measures.  In a
separate application of age measurement…GDP would be between seven and ten percent higher by 2050 if retirement
lengths stabilize.

Here is the paper (I can’t find a non-gated version).  Note that the entire increase of life expectancy of the twentieth century has been taken in the form of retirement, rather than extra work.  Of course our social security and Medicare policies have encouraged early retirement, and we have not adjusted age eligibilities for longer life spans and better health.  For fiscal reasons, we will likely have to increase eligibility ages; not only will we spend less money but it will encourage more work.

If you have been thinking that a demographically-based American economic collapse is virtually inevitable, this paper gives some grounds for hope.  Here is further commentary.

In today’s America, there are more World of Warcraft players than farmers.

Hat tip to Paul Krugman.

We find that the elasticity between mothers’ and children’s BMI has
increased since the 1970s, suggesting that shared genetic-environmental
factors have become more important in determining obesity.

Here is more.