The PNG Department of Treasury has some positions vacant. From the list:
Assistant Secretary(GEP) K31,289 plus other allowances
Or about $16,000 Australian. I don’t think I’ll apply…
(Of course, that’s about 18 times PNG’s GDP per capita, while I only earn a bit over two times Australian GDP per capita).
Via Marginal Revolution is this neat map of Starbucks and McDonalds’ global reach..
The thing does raise a bit of a rant in me. The chart shows McDonalds as having global sales of $41 billion, which is compared to the GDP of Afghanistan ($21 billion). The message from this is meant to be ‘Wow, McDonalds is twice as big as Afghanistan’. The only problem is that it’s just not true!
GDP is measured in ‘value added’ terms. Only new economic activity is counted. In particular, the cost of inputs (such as burgers, buns and fries) is not counted. So for a company like McDonalds it’s ‘GDP’ is actually equal to its profit on goods sold plus wages and salaries paid to employees, which would be far less than their total sales.
What’s my point? My point is that the world economy is almost incomprehensibly huge, and that even gigantic, omni-present companies such as McDonalds are only a tiny, tiny part of it. Misleading comparisons, such as comparing total sales revenue to GDP figures, takes away some of that sense of scale.
(As an aside, you can calculate a very rough ‘sales’ figure for an economy, using the input-output tables that are occasionally published in the National Accounts. In 2001-02, the most recent figures, Australia had a GDP of $890 billion, but had total supplies (‘sales’) of $2,457 billion.)
From the Los Angeles Times:
Bird flu has killed 134 people around the world, sickened hundreds more and forced the culling of millions of poultry from Vietnam to Nigeria. Now it is smashing the world of badminton.
Which, of course, is why it’s usually a fools errand to try and forecast these second round impacts too closely.
(via Digg).
Over at Marginal Revolution Tyler Cowen is suggesting that stupid sales assistants might be better for smart consumers:
Customers cannot talk for so long to a stupid person. So if you know what you are doing, you might prefer that the sales people be stupider. Stupid people will spend more time, in percentage terms, helping the already informed.
I’m not convinced. Firstly, smart people might break away from a stupid salesperson, but what about other stupid people? My experience has tended to be that the longest waits I’ve experienced waiting for help have been due to the other customers, and not to the sales person.
(I’m resisting the temptation to throw together some equations or a spreadsheet model of this).
I think the overall economics of sales assistants is simpler, but far more cynical. Good, knowledgeable sales people will, on average, require a higher rate of return due to the human capital they’ve built up. Bad sales assistants on the other hand will not require as high a wage. Businesses will only hire a good sales person if they provide a better return than the bad ones, and I suspect that’s not the case – as Tyler says, any idiot can point out where the batteries are.
(And, I suspect, there’s a bit of a premium on stupidity and dishonesty in some areas of commission sales).
Via Brad De Long, The Gapminder World 2006. Very, very cool data visualisation.
(Not particularly ground breaking, but the user interface and animations are the best bits from my point of view).
Now can someone please do something for the Australian economic data?