Gaby Del Valle investigated multilevel marketing companies and found. According to the Direct Selling Association, the multilevel marketing (MLM) industry’s lobbying arm, one in six American households is involved in the industry. Most MLM salespeople don’t make a ton of money —…
Blog Archives
Interest rates are low because of demographic changes and rising corporate power
Greg Mankiw wrote in the NYT about the puzzle of persistently low interest rates. Interest rates have been lower than ever before in history and they have been very low for decades so low interest rates seems to be the…
Posted in Macro, Managerial Micro
Amazon as a nonprofit
For most of Amazon’s history it made zero profit. That changed a couple years ago, but although its gross profit margin on revenues is now positive, it is still pretty negligible today. Amazon is a huge conglomerate these days, but…
Posted in Managerial Micro
A history of the Corporation
There have always been large organizations that have done the kinds of things corporations do, but for most of human history, large organizations were run by religious hierarchies or governments rather than for-profit businesses. For-profit businesses were always small which…
Posted in Managerial Micro
The expected value of potential lives lost during atomic testing
Rob Reid wrote a great explanation of the horrible risk taken during the Manhattan Project, when American nuclear scientists took a chance estimated at one-in-three million that the first atomic test would create a chain reaction that would ignite the…
An airline “dent and scratch sale”
A classic story of price discrimination that textbooks tell is the appliance ‘dent and scratch’ sale in which an appliance store will deliberately create cosmetic damage on some of their washers and refrigerators so that they can sell them at…
Posted in Managerial Micro
VOX messed up: Amazon.com already has enormous monopoly power
Emily Stewart at Vox.com made a mistake about monopoly power in America. She wrote that Amazon… could eventually become so big that it can control what shipping companies such as FedEx and UPS charge it, and, in areas where it becomes…
Posted in Managerial Micro, Public Finance
