News Vaults and an Economic Puzzle

With so many hours of TV stored in news vaults why are stations like ABC, NBC, and CBS holding all this content and not selling it to the public? ABC and NBC license footage to organizations. These organizations have to pay some type of fee or royalty to use the footage. However, if all this footage was released to the public and sold on iTunes couldn’t these companies be making lots of money? Economics would tell us that there is some reason why these companies are not doing this or else they would already be doing it. C-SPAN recently put its archived footage since 1987 online for free. C-SPAN has over 116,000 hours of footage and shows like The John Stewart Show and the Colbert Report use it for research (mainly to do jokes). The cost to C-SPAN to digitize everything was around $1 million per year. C-SPAN does recover part of the money by selling the same content on DVD’s for around Vanderbilt University has a Television News Archive that goes back to 1968 and allows people to make a video request loan for footage at a cost of $12 per every half hour of TV. Also, a lot of video is already free online. For instance, YouTube has a lot of older content that really covers important or breaking news.

In time I believe the cost to digitize older footage will decrease and with the growing space that hard drives allow for I think one day we could see news footage for sale to the public. It would be interesting to one day have a TIVO device and just search for anything ever on TV like the 1996 World Series or a Presidential Election.

Government Spending

Blue line represents spending at the spending rates under Bush. Black line is actual spending and Cross over line is when Obama came into office. (H/T Steve Landsburg)

Don Boudreaux on Law and Legislation

Talk given October 4, 2010 by Donald Boudreaux

FFF October 2010 from The Future of Freedom Foundation on Vimeo.

Interception of the Worst Kind

John Elway and a "business partner" invested $15 million with a hedge fund manager named Sean Mueller who is now charged with running a Ponzi scheme. John Elway's net worth is around $45 million (according to celebritynetworth.com, although don't know how accurate these numbers are). You would think Elway would be a little smarter with his money considering he has an economics degree from Stanford. I wonder why professional athletes don't take their money seriously when they know their careers statistically are usually less than a decade. Of course there are few exceptions like Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods (before his divorce), and Magic Johnson. Hopefully, Elway learns from this mistake and will be more careful with his investing in the future. Mistakes are the best tool for learning.

Chile and Capitalism

I am glad to see all the miners in Chile are safe after spending 69 days below the depths of the earth. However, I am glad to see capitalism was at work. Companies and people trying to make money benefit society and don't take something away. The economy is not a zero-sum game but an economic pie that can grow or shrink. Companies in the United States are not only trying to get rich but millions of others around the world are also trying to get rich. Below is a list of how the Chilean miners were saved.

Drill rig- Schramm Inc. (US)

Cable-(Germany)

Fiber optic cable- (Japan)

Communication- Samsung (South Korea)

Self-sterilizing socks- Cupron Inc. (U.S.)

Allowing companies around the world to perform their core competency makes everyone better off and in the case of the miners saved their lives. Maybe 10 or 15 years ago the miners might not have been able to have been saved (since the technology or drill may not have existed). Greed is good and can even save lives.

Bryan Caplan and Case Against Education

I saw a post on Econlib by Bryan Caplan about the case against education. I found this talk given at a FEE meeting June 23, 2010. Caplan makes great arguments about why perhaps we might be overeducated. I agree with him on this point. No one should be forced to school if they don't want to.

http://fee.org/media/the-case-against-education/