Centives

Andrew Marantz at MotherJones spent his summer at an Indian Call Center and wrote about what he learnt. Some of the more interesting points include:

• Businesses in India don’t trust the public infrastructure and so they hire private cars to taxi their employees back and forth.
• Call center workers will earn 20,000 rupees per month. This translates to about $2 per hour and $5,000 per year in a country where the per capita income is about $900 per year.
• Call center workers undergo ‘culture training’ where they have to memorize things such as state capitals and must watch episodes of Seinfeld.
• One call center divides customers into seven categories: Eccentric, Arrogant, Bumpkin, Quarrelsome, Prudent, Assertive and Sweet-spoken.
• Workers at a call center can only succeed if they “de-Indianize” and lose or remake part of their identity. This might have adverse psychological effects.

Click here to read more and find out about the sociology of Australian, British and American people as taught by an Indian culture trainer. You can also read about the Indian Marxist telephone operator and the standard sleeping arrangements for workers.

Source: MotherJones

The Economist took a look at which emerging market economies appeared to be overheating. The countries with the greatest risk of out of control growth were:

• Argentina
• Brazil
• Hong Kong
• India
• Indonesia
• Turkey
• Vietnam

China which analysts have focused on over the past year or so as an economy in danger of crashing after decades of stunning growth does remarkably well in The Economist’s rankings. Concerns about the strength of the Chinese economy seem misplaced.

The ranking is composed of six measures that include: inflation, spare production capacity, unemployment, credit expansion, real interest rate and external balance. To read more about how other emerging market economies ranked in the index, and how the ranking was composed click here.

Source: The Economist

In a finding that has appeared to hold up remarkably well across populations and over time, it appears that people are for more likely to die in the immediate days after they are given their first pay checks. For those between the ages of 17 and 29 the cause of death is often “substance abuse and blunt force trauma from auto accidents.” Find out other risk factors and findings related to the research over here.

Source: Freakonomics

Reuters reports that the Pakistani Taliban is selling suicide bombers to militant networks for up to $93,000 per bomber. They are being purchased by groups operating in Afghanistan.

Source: Reuters

Via: Marginal Revolution

High unemployment has resulted from the past recession, and thus it should be no surprise that teens are having trouble finding summer jobs. As a matter of fact, they have been hit hardest in terms of job outlook by this latest recession. Many have blamed the government for cutting back on employment programs for teens, but in this article, it is argued that the government is not all that important in putting teens to work. The private sector is actually where most teens end up finding jobs, but with the current state of the economy, many of these businesses are not taking on as many workers as they used to, leaving many teens unemployed. It is later suggested that the government would be better off deregulating the labor force in order to provide more work for teens. There’s no doubt that this suggestion would be rather controversial, though. Read the rest of the article to see their full argument behind suggesting such a solution.

Source: Economix Blog

The airlines have consistently been losing money year after year. Many people have attributed this trend to a combination of high fuel costs and high taxes. However, this article maintains that this does not tell the entire story. Since the airlines were deregulated 30 years ago, they’ve lost a total of around $60 billion. However, in those years, high fuel costs only were a factor for the first few years and the last few years; the years in between, the cost of fuel was low and they still were not consistently posting profits. They also argue that taxes have not been the main cause of this, either. Rather, legacy airlines have higher operating costs than the low-cost carriers which has kept them from being very competitive. Read the entire article for the full explanation of this situation.

Source: Freakonomics Blog

A few years ago Arstechnica looked at the economics behind the movie theater industry. Some of their findings include:

• Popcorn can have up to a 900% mark up.
• Soda can have a 3000% mark up.
• Advertisers pay up to $50,000 per screen per year to theater owners. Sometimes they ask the cinema management to turn up the volume of their ads in the hopes of better capturing the audience’s attention.
• Theaters get to keep about 50% of the total value of ticket sales.

Read more over here.

Source: Arstechnica

Is it possible that too many people desire a PhD without properly understanding the underlying value of the degree? The Economist suggests that it might be. Their arguments include:

• The number of PhD positions seems to have little to do with the number of available job openings for that degree.
• On the flip side business executives are complaining that they don’t have enough skilled workers, suggesting that PhDs are teaching students the wrong types of skills.
• Even countries that have a declining population (such as Japan) have had a recent spurt in students with PhD degrees. This is a problem that will get worse as the Asian countries rise and expand their academic institutions.
• Universities have begun to treat PhD students as “cheap, highly motivated and disposable labour,” paying them as little as $20,000 a year.
• Postdocs in Canada have a lower average salary than construction workers.

There’s a lot more in the full report available here.

Source: The Economist

In 2005 News Corp. acquired MySpace for $580 million. Now, six years later, after a long search for a buyer, News Corp. has finally sold it for $35 million. As is common with most companies, News Corp. doesn’t talk about the specific financial flows behind any one project and so it’s difficult to know how MySpace affected News Corp. Still, Arstechnica
attempted to make some inferences based on educated guesses. Arstechnica
estimates that MySpace was losing $8 million a year when it was acquired by News Corp. and that it lost $431 million in 2010, the year before it was able to offload it. You can read more about the analysis here.

Source: Arstechnica