Profits are maximised where marginal cost equals marginal revenue. And in a perfectly competitive market, where price equals marginal revenue, profits are maximised where marginal cost equals price. But what if marginal cost equals zero? Should the competitive profit-maximising firm give the product away? Or is there simply no opportunity for making a profit when there is a high degree of competition?
This is the dilemma considered in the articles linked below. According to Jeremy Rifkin, what we are seeing is the development of technologies that have indeed pushed marginal cost to zero, or close to it, in a large number of sectors of the economy. For example, information can be distributed over the Internet at little or no cost, other than the time of the distributor who is often willing to do this freely in a spirit of sharing. What many people are becoming, says Rifkin, are ‘prosumers’: producing, sharing and consuming.
Over the past decade millions of consumers have become prosumers, producing and sharing music, videos, news, and knowledge at near-zero marginal cost and nearly for free, shrinking revenues in the music, newspaper and book-publishing industries.
What was once confined to a limited number of industries – music, photography, news, publishing and entertainment – is now spreading.
A new economic paradigm – the collaborative commons – has leaped onto the world stage as a powerful challenger to the capitalist market.
A growing legion of prosumers is producing and sharing information, not only knowledge, news and entertainment, but also renewable energy, 3D printed products and online college courses at near-zero marginal cost on the collaborative commons. They are even sharing cars, homes, clothes and tools, entirely bypassing the conventional capitalist market.
So is a collaborative commons a new paradigm that can replace capitalism in a large number of sectors? Are we gradually becoming sharers? And elsewhere, are we becoming swappers?
Articles
Capitalism is making way for the age of free The Guardian, Jeremy Rifkin (31/3/14)
The End of the Capitalist Era, and What Comes Next Huffington Post, Jeremy Rifkin (1/4/14)
Has the Post-Capitalist Economy Finally Arrived? Working Knowledge, James Heskett (2/4/14)
Questions
- In what aspects of your life are you a prosumer? Is this type of behaviour typical of what has always gone on in families and society?
- If marginal cost is zero, why may average cost be well above zero? Illustrate with a diagram.
- Could a monopolist make a profit if marginal cost was zero? Again, illustrate with a diagram.
- Is it desirable for there to be temporary monopoly profits for inventors of new products and services?
- What is meant by a ‘collaborative commons’? Do you participate in such a commons and, if so, how and why?
- Should tweets and Facebook posts be regarded as output?
- What is meant by an internet-of-things infrastructure?
- What are the incentives for authors to contribute to Wikipedia?
- Could marginal cost ever be zero for new physical products?
- Think about the things you buy in the supermarket. Could any of these be produced at zero marginal cost?
- How can capitalists make profits as ‘aggregators of network services and solutions’?
- Provide a critique of Rifkin’s arguments.
Britain has faced some its worst ever weather, with thousands of homes flooded once again, though the total number of flooded households has fallen compared to previous floods. However, for many households, it is just more of the same – if you’ve been flooded once, you’re likely to be flooded again and hence insurance against flooding is essential. But, if you’re an insurance company, do you really want to provide cover to a house that you can almost guarantee will flood?
The government has pledged thousands to help households and businesses recover from the damage left by the floods and David Cameron’s latest step has been to urge insurance companies to deal with claims for flood damage as fast as possible. He has not, however, said anything regarding ‘premium holidays’ for flood victims.
The problem is that the premium you are charged depends on many factors and one key aspect is the likelihood of making a claim. The more likely the claim, the higher the premium. If a household has previous experience of flooding, the insurance company will know that there is a greater likelihood of flooding occurring again and thus the premium will be increased to reflect this greater risk. There have been concerns that some particularly vulnerable home-owners will be unable to find or afford home insurance.
The key thing with insurance is that in order for it to be provided privately, certain conditions must hold. The probability of the event occurring must be less than 1 – insurance companies will not insure against certainty. The probability of the event must be known on aggregate to allow insurance companies to calculate premiums. Probabilities must be independent – if one person makes a claim, it should not increase the likelihood of others making claims.
Finally, there should be no adverse selection or moral hazard, both of which derive from asymmetric information. The former occurs where the person taking out the insurance can hide information from the company (i.e. that they are a bad risk) and the latter occurs when the person taking out insurance changes their behaviour once they are insured. Only if these conditions hold or there are easy solutions will the private market provide insurance.
On the demand-side, consumers must be willing to pay for insurance, which provides them with protection against certain contingencies: in this case against the cost of flood damage. Given the choice, rational consumers will only take out an insurance policy if they believe that the value they get from the certainty of knowing they are covered exceeds the cost of paying the insurance premium. However, if the private market fails to offer insurance, because of failures on the supply-side, there will be major gaps in coverage.
Furthermore, even if insurance policies are offered to those at most risk of flooding, the premiums charged by the insurance companies must be high enough to cover the cost of flood damage. For some homeowners, these premiums may be unaffordable, again leading to gaps in coverage.
Perhaps here there is a growing role for the government and we have seen proposals for a government-backed flood insurance scheme for high-risk properties due to start in 2015. However, a loop hole may mean that wealthy homeowners pay a levy for it, but are not able to benefit from the cheaper premiums, as they are deemed to be able to afford higher premiums. This could see many homes in the Somerset Levels being left out of this scheme, despite households being underwater for months. There is also a further role for government here and that is more investment in flood defences. If that occurs though, where will the money come from? The following articles consider flooding and the problem of insurance.
Articles
Insurers urged to process flood claims quickly BBC News (17/2/14)
Flood area defences put on hold by government funding cuts The Guardian, Damian Carrington and Rajeev Syal (17/2/14)
Flooding: 200,000 houses at risk of being uninsurable The Telegraph (31/1/12)
Govt flood insurance plan ‘will not work’ Sky News (14/2/14)
Have we learned our lessons on flooding? BBC News, Roger Harrabin (14/2/14)
ABI refuses to renew statement of principles for flood insurance Insurance Age, Emmanuel Kenning (31/1/12)
Wealthy will have to pay more for flood insurance but won’t be covered because their houses are too expensive Mail Online, James Chapman (7/2/14)
Buyers need ‘flood ratings’ on all houses, Aviva Chief warns The Telegraph, James Quinn (15/2/14)
Wealthy homeowners won’t be helped by flood insurance scheme The Telegraph(11/2/14)
Costly insurance ‘will create flood-risk ghettos and £4.3tn fall in house values’ The Guardian, Patrick Wintour (12/2/14)
Leashold homes face flood insurance risk Financial Times, Alistair Gray (10/2/14)
Questions
- Consider the market for insurance against flood damage. Are risks less than one? Explain your answer.
- Explain whether or not the risk of flooding is independent.
- Are the problems of moral hazard and adverse selection relevant in the case of home insurance against flood damage?
- To what extent is the proposed government-backed flood insurance an equitable scheme? Should the government be stepping in to provide insurance itself?
- Should there be greater regulation when houses are sold to provide better information about the risk of flooding?
- Why if the concept of opportunity cost relevant here?
- How might household values be affected by recent floods, in light of the issues with insurance?
GDP is still the most frequently used indicator of a country’s development. When governments target economic growth as a key goal, it is growth in GDP to which they are referring. And they often make the assumption that growth in GDP is a proxy for growth in well-being. But is it time to leave GDP behind as the main indicator of national economic success? This is the question posed in the first of the linked articles below, from the prestigious science journal Nature.
As the article states:
Robert F. Kennedy once said that a country’s gross domestic product (GDP) measures “everything except that which makes life worthwhile”. The metric was developed in the 1930s and 1940s amid the upheaval of the Great Depression and global war. Even before the United Nations began requiring countries to collect data to report national GDP, Simon Kuznets, the metric’s chief architect, had warned against equating its growth with well-being.
GDP measures mainly market transactions. It ignores social costs, environmental impacts and income inequality. If a business used GDP-style accounting, it would aim to maximize gross revenue — even at the expense of profitability, efficiency, sustainability or flexibility. That is hardly smart or sustainable (think Enron). Yet since the end of the Second World War, promoting GDP growth has remained the primary national policy goal in almost every country
So what could replace GDP, or be considered alongside GDP? Should we try to measure happiness? After all, behavioural scientists are getting much better at 
understanding and measuring the psychology of human well-being (see the blog posts Money can’t buy me love and Happiness economics).
Or should we focus primarily on long-term issues of the sustainability of development? Or should we focus more on the distribution of income or well-being in a world that is becoming increasingly unequal?
Or should measures of well-being involve weighted composite indices involving things such as life-expectancy, education, housing, democratic engagement, leisure time, social mobility, etc. And, if so, how should the weightings of the different indicators be determined? The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) produces annual Human Development Reports, where countries are ranked according to a Human Development Index. As the UNDP site states:
The breakthrough for the HDI was the creation of a single statistic which was to serve as a frame of reference for both social and economic development. The HDI sets a minimum and a maximum for each dimension, called goalposts, and then shows where each country stands in relation to these goalposts, expressed as a value between 0 and 1.
HDI is a composite of three sets of indicators: education, life expectancy and income (see). The UNDP since 2010 has also produced an Inequality-adjusted HDI (IHDI).
The IHDI will be equal to the HDI value when there is no inequality, but falls below the HDI value as inequality rises. The difference between the HDI and the IHDI represents the ‘loss’ in potential human development due to inequality and can be expressed as a percentage.
You can now build your own HDI for each country on the UNDP site by selecting from the following indicators: health, education, income, inequality, poverty and gender.
The Nature article considers a number of measures of progress and considers their relative merits. The other articles also look at measuring national progress and well-being and at the relationship between income per head and happiness. It is clear that focusing on GDP alone provides too simplistic an approach to measuring development.
Development: Time to leave GDP behind Nature, Robert Costanza, Ida Kubiszewski, Enrico Giovannini, Hunter Lovins, Jacqueline McGlade, Kate E. Pickett, Kristín Vala Ragnarsdóttir, Debra Roberts, Roberto De Vogli and Richard Wilkinson (15/1/14)
The happiness agenda makes for miserable policy The Conversation, Daniel Sage (9/1/14)
Economic view: No matter what the politicians say, GDP is a distorted guide to economic performance and a bad way to measure prosperity Independent, Guy Hands (28/1/14)
Buy buy love The Economist (22/6/13)
Experts confirm that money does buy happiness – but only up to £22,100 Independent, Jamie Merrill (28/11/13)
Can Money Buy Happiness? Scientific American, Sonja Lyubomirsky (10/8/10)
Money can buy happiness The Economist (2/5/13)
Money can buy happiness Hacker News, pyduan (13/1/14)
Can ‘happiness economics’ provide a new framework for development? The Guardian, Christian Kroll (3/9/13)
The 10 Things Economics Can Tell Us About Happiness The Atlantic, Derek Thompson (31/5/12)
Financial crisis hits happiness levels BBC News (3/11/13)
Happiness study finds that UK is passing point of peak life satisfaction The Guardian, Larry Elliott (27/11/13)
How GDP became the figure everyone wanted to watch BBC News, Peter Day (16/4/14)
Economic development can only buy happiness up to a ‘sweet spot’ of $36,000 GDP per person Science Daily (27/11/13)
Questions
- What does GDP measure?
- How suitable a measure of economic progress is growth in GDP?
- How can GDP be adjusted to make it a more suitable measure of economic progress?
- What are the advantages of using composite indicators of well-being?
- What difficulties are there in measuring well-being using composite indicators?
- Assuming there were no measurement problems, what indicators would you include in devising the optimum composite indicator of well-being?
- Can money buy happiness?
- Why do life satisfaction levels peak at around $36,000 (adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity (PPP))?
World leaders are meeting at the World Economic Forum in Davos, in the Swiss Alps. This annual conference is an opportunity for politicans, economists and businesspeople from around the world to discuss the state of the world economy and to consider policy options.
To coincide with the conference, the BBC’s Newsnight has produced the following slide show, which presents some economic facts about the world economy. The slide show provides no commentary and there is no commentary either in this blog – just some questions for you to ponder.
Using the economics you’ve learned so far, try answering these questions, which focus on the reasons for the patterns in the figures, the likely future patterns and the policy implications.
Slide show
Davos: 22 facts people should know BBC Newsnight (23/1/14)
Data
For additional international data to help you answer the questions, see:
Economic Data freely available online Economics Network
Questions
- Go through each of the slides in the Newsnight presentation and select the ones of most interest to you. Then, as an economist, provide an explanation for them.
- Identify some patterns over time in the statistics. Then project forward 20 years and discuss whether the patterns are likely to have changed and, if so, why.
- What policies could governments adopt to reverse any undesirable trends you have identified? How likely are these policies to be implemented and how successful are they likely to be?
In December 2013, Uruguay passed a law permitting the growing, distribution and consumption of marijuana. The legislation comes into effect in April 2014. The state will regulate the industry to ensure good quality strains of the crop are grown and sold. It will also tax the industry.
Uruguay is the first country to legalise cannabis, but in July 2012, Colorado and Washington states in the USA passed laws permitting the sale and possession of small amounts of the drug for recreational use. (It was already legal to possess the drug for medical use.) The laws took effect a few months later. It is heavily taxed, however, especially in Washington, where it is taxed at a rate of 25% three times over: when it is sold to the processor; when the processor sells it to the retailer; and when the retailer sells it to the consumer. In Massachusetts, Nevada and Oregon, medical cannabis shops will be permitted to open this year. In the Netherlands, although the sale of cannabis is still illegal, ‘coffee shops’ are permitted to sell people up to 5 grams per day.
So should cannabis be legalised? People have very strong views on the subject and this can make a calm assessment of the issue more difficult. The economist’s approach to legalising cannabis involves seeking to identify and measure the costs and benefits of doing so. If the benefits exceed the costs, then it should be legalised; if not, it should remain illegal (or made illegal). The problem is that the size of the costs and benefits are not easy calculate as they involve estimates of things such as consumption levels, tax revenues, crime reduction, the effects on the consumption of other drugs, including legal drugs such as alcohol and tobacco.
Nevertheless, various estimates of these costs and benefits have been made and provide a basis for discussion.
Possible benefits of cannabis legalisation include: increased tax revenues for the government; reduction in crime, and hence reduction in law enforcement and prison costs; encouraging people with addiction problems to seek help, as they would not fear arrest; reduction in the price, benefiting users; regulating quality of the drug; reducing the consumption of alcohol and more dangerous drugs if these are substitutes for cannabis; moral arguments concerning freedom of individuals to choose their lifestyle.
Possible costs include: increased consumption of cannabis, with attendant health and social side effects; increased consumption of other drugs if they are complements, or if cannabis is an ‘entry level’ drug to harder drugs; moral objections to drug taking.
Clearly some of these costs and benefits are easier to measure than others. Moral arguments are almost impossible to assess quantitatively, even when various underlying moral standpoints are agreed.
The following articles look at recent events and at the arguments, both economic and non-economic.
Articles
As Uruguay moves to legalise cannabis, is the ‘war on drugs’ finished? Metro (20/1/14)
Regulating the sale of marijuana: Global perspective Journalist’s Resource, John Wihbey (17/1/14)
Next Step in Uruguay: Competitive, Quality Marijuana Independent European Daily Express (IEDE) (12/1/14)
U.S. support for legalization of marijuana at an all-time HIGH Mail Online, Anna Edwards (7/1/14)
14 Ways Marijuana Legalization Could Boost The Economy Huffington Post, Harry Bradford (7/11/12)
Colorado pot legalization: 30 questions (and answers) The Denver Post, John Ingold (13/12/12)
Economists Predict Marijuana Legalization Will Produce ‘Public-Health Benefits’ Forbes, Jacob Sullum (1/11/13)
Papers
Economics of Cannabis Legalization Hemp Today, Dale Gieringer (10/10/93)
Pros & Cons of Legalizing Marijuana About.com: US Liberal Politics, Deborah White
Would Marijuana Legalization Increase the Demand for Marijuana? About.com: Economics, Mike Moffatt
Time to Legalize Marijuana? – 500+ Economists Endorse Marijuana Legalization About.com: Economics, Mike Moffatt
A cost benefit analysis of cannabis legalisation Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Essex
Licensing and regulation of the cannabis market in England and Wales: Towards a cost–benefit analysis Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Essex, Mark Bryan, Emilia Del Bono and Stephen Pudney (9/13)
What Can We Learn from the Dutch Cannabis Coffeeshop Experience? Rand Drug Policy Research Center, Robert J. MacCoun (7/10)
Podcast
Licensing and regulating the cannabis market in England and Wales Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Essex, Stephen Pudney (15/9/13)
Questions
- If a country legalises cannabis, what is likely to happen to the price of cannabis? Use a demand and supply diagram to illustrate your argument, considering the effects on both demand and supply. How are the price elasticities of demand and supply relevant to your answer?
- What externalities are there from drug use?
- What externalities are there from making cannabis illegal?
- Distinguish between complementary and substitute goods for cannabis? How is the demand for these likely to be affected by legalising cannabis?
- Go through each of the benefits and costs of legalising cannabis and identify difficulties that might be experienced in quantifying these costs and benefits?
- If cannabis were legalised, how would you set about determining the optimum rate of tax on cannabis production, processing, distribution and sale?
- Consider the arguments for and against legalising cannabis from the perspective of (a) a free-market liberal and (b) a social democrat who sees government intervention as an important means of achieving various social goals.
Profits are maximised where marginal cost equals marginal revenue. And in a perfectly competitive market, where price equals marginal revenue, profits are maximised where marginal cost equals price. But what if marginal cost equals zero? Should the competitive profit-maximising firm give the product away? Or is there simply no opportunity for making a profit when there is a high degree of competition?
