Wednesday 17 June 2009

Economics of pirates and clowns

The Planet Money podcast, who are always great, have done a fascinating piece on the business model and economics of piracy (section starting from 09:30):

Pirates have timesheets

They follow up on some of the business relationships created some weeks later:

And three baby camels.

They have lots more on many other subjects, including the position of a clown as unsecured creditor of an insolvent shopping centre. I hope she gets her money, apparently very tiny creditors like that sometimes do; the big ones pay them off because it makes a lot of sense to make the voting simpler. And I think it's a good feature of the US system that it gives them an incentive to do that.

2 comments:

maya said...

Talk about unlikely places where to find a timesheet...unusual, interesting and informative podcast. Now that I have the knowledge I only need a sword and eye patch to set up my new business enterprise. What about a tango pirate, in which case a pair of sharp stiletto shoes might suffice. Would that be enought to get me any ramson payment? ;-P

msHedgehog said...

Although in one sense there might be plenty of tango pirates around, to be quite honest I don't think there's enough money in the business to attract that level of professionalism.