Review:Economics in One Lesson 

Henry Hazlitt’s “Economics in One Lesson” gives a different perception on the field."Considered to be Hazlitt’s magnum opus, “Economics in One Lesson” contradicts everything that mainstream media outlets, Keynesian economists, CNBC analysts and left-leaning professors have taught for the last few decades. No, war is not good for the economy, printing vast amounts of money will not stimulate economic growth, minimum wage laws do not generate jobs, credit actually diverts production, unions are not helping wages and government intervention into our lives will not spur morality."It may be a bold statement, but this near 200-page book can provide a lot more important points of information than a four-year university degree can. Instead of being indoctrinated with the idea that without government intrusion capitalism would not exist, the reader is taught that government oversteps its boundaries and corrupts capitalism."

If you are interested in learning more about economics, this is the book to get you started. "Economics in One Lesson" is the real stuff! Each essay is clear and easy to read with no hard math for us remedial liberal arts majors. More organized and consistent than Friedman, Hazlitt shows that economics only becomes complicated when it is twisted and contorted so as to fit an intellectually dishonest view of the world.This book basically introduced the Austrian School of Thought on Economics. The "Austrians" vindicate the market economy's spontaneous order as the surest way to have optimal prosperity, opportunity, and individual liberty for the masses. The verbal logic and reasoning of the Austrian school is generally easy to understand and makes sense to the reader.

This book is so simple and so brilliant at so many levels. The author begins by stating a simple premise: "One must not only consider a vocal minority now but also consider everyone in the long run. Then he lists time and time again when governments have tried to band-aid social and economic problems with disastrous results. "Farmers are doing bad? Subsidize! People are homeless? Cap the cost of housing! People are poor? Raise the minimum wage!" These suggestions all seem to make sense--at least in the short term for those directly affected. It is setup as a series of 23 different examples describing everyday occurrences to illustrate fundamental economic principles. How a broken window impacts the overall wealth of the community is among the most famous of these examples. Others address the value of public works projects, the importance of exports, the impact of taxation on production, the relationship of employment to the minimum wage and the inflationary result of printing money."Economics in One Lesson" by Henry Hazlitt succeeds very well at what it was meant to do. The book makes it extremely easy for the reader to learn about economics. The book is simple and easy to understand. And it's also quite enjoyable to read. And it's only about 200 pages long, so it can be read in a relatively short period of time.

Economics of Digital Media and Piracy

The rise of Internet media piracy is often cited as the primary source of falling profits in the media industries, as markets for music, movies, and television have diminished since the turn of the millennium. This had led to niche of studies in economics and business-related fields aimed at quantifying losses to the industries and providing potential solutions. 

The transition from traditional media markets to digital markets was one of the dominant threads of discussion. Traditional markets, channels might be print, or radio and television, either broadcasting or cable.  Firms earn revenue from advertising, subscriptions, or a combination of the two. Firms face a downward sloping demand curve because an increase in price reduces the amount of advertising or subscriptions they sell, and vice versa. 

Digital market where the channel might be a website on the Internet. The firm faces a downward sloping demand curve, but prevailing prices are much lower. The firm is forced to charge a fraction of its price in the traditional market. Prices are lower in the digital market because of the volume of identical or close to identical media content – audiences easily can switch to a substitute if the firm raises prices.  In addition, most online advertising revenue is generated on about 50 websites, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau.Everyone else competes for small shares of the remaining revenue.

Intense competition in the digital market might create a price ceiling, illustrated by the kinked demand curve.  When prices reach the flat portion of the demand curve, additional increases mean the firm will lose all of its customers. The risk of this happening drives the debate about charging for access to websites. Classic differentiation strategy - provides content tailored to the interests of different market segments – or niche audiences. a cost-reduction strategy.  Reduce costs by creating economies of scale, republish the same or similar content in different channels.  This is often referred to as convergence. Another strategy is based on moving away from intensely competitive digital channels. Firms are trying to find less competitive channels where audiences and advertisers are more likely to pay for differentiated content.

Piracy is the illegal reproduction (copy or counterfeiting) of work such as software, recordings or motion pictures. With the advanced evolution of technology, piracy has become easier and, at the same time, more prevalent. Protected music can be downloaded from the Internet without paying for it. Computer software can be programmed by cheap workers offshore copying the design behind the original software. Although most know about software piracy, many people don’t fully comprehend its impact.

Pirated material is distributed in two ways. Unknowing consumers buy pirated items. Others buy pirated items knowing they are pirated. According to the Business Software Alliance, software theft costs Industry $51 billion in 2009. Piracy diverts money away from producers and distributors of items such as audio recordings, making those companies who make an investment in production and distribution less profitable. Except in the case where pirated items are sold through retail channels and taxed, tax revenue is not generated from pirated items. For example, when music is downloaded with no tax charged when it is supposed to be, as dictated by tax laws, that revenue is lost as well. Lost tax revenue reduces funds available by the taxing government to spend. To lessen the effect of piracy on a business, businesses can implement methods to discourage software piracy, such as changes to how software is distributed to make it harder to download. Another way to lessen piracy is to educate the public about the impact of piracy on their lives. For example, piracy causes items to be more expensive because a company does not realize the income it is entitled to and has to charge higher prices for its products to make up for lost revenue.

The explosive growth of piracy as digital technologies became cheap and ubiquitous around the world, and another following the growth of industry lobbies that have reshaped laws and law enforcement around copyright protection. The report argues that these efforts have largely failed, and that the problem of piracy is better conceived as a failure of affordable access to media in legal markets.

The growth of digital piracy since the mid-1990s has undermined a wide range of media business models, but it has also disrupted this bad market equilibrium and created opportunities in emerging economies for price and service innovations that leverage the new technologies. In our view, the most important question is not whether stronger enforcement can reduce piracy and preserve the existing market structure—our research offers no reassurance on this front—but whether stable cultural and business models can emerge at the low end of these media markets that are capable of addressing the next several billion media consumers. Our country studies provide glimpses of this reinvention as costs of production and distribution decline and as producers and distributors compete and innovate.

How Blog Affect the Mainstream Media Economics

The best way to define an Open Source is by looking at the collaboration it creates among users by providing them unique opportunities to use, program and upgrade important software. Blogs have been compared lately with Open Source projects in the sense that they present similar opportunities for people to collaborate on significant issues of public concerns, and doing so with the liberty to voice their own opinions on these matters. Open Source projects like Linux, Wikipedia, and so on. Linux system, in particular, accounts for 23% of the entire operating systems of all servers. This reveals that Open Source project commands an appreciable amount of the whole operating systems. Similarly, blog projects provided freely by Internet companies like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Word Press, and other independent companies offer the public the unique opportunity to express their views without having to pay so much money for using them. Statistically, it may be impossible to estimate all the number of blogs existing in the blogosphere; however, Technocratic tracked as many as 30 million blogs to discover what they contained various messages targeted at the billions of Internet users globally.

Now that they are comparatively the same, what motivates bloggers and Open Source programmers to do what they are doing? It is important to outline the apparent motivations that push people to blog before explaining if there are some incentives for doing so or not. Bloggers are agitated to exchange their messages with the people of the world: they blog about fashion, cooking, education, lifestyles, religion, politics and so on. In the same way, the programmers of Open Source projects are naturally motivated to share their knowledge with the public—they are glad to give people the chance to use and upgrade these free software and apply them in their businesses, education, day- to-day commercial activities and so on. The list of the Open source software now seems unending: there are Mozilla, Joomla, Apache, Openoffice.org, MongoDB, and GNU Project. But the extent to which these resources could be made available free of charge for public use may be limited owing to the costs of maintaining them.

Open Source Projects' programmers are getting financial, legal, and moral supports from governmental bodies, private corporations and the public as a whole. These have become incredible incentives for the programmers to keep working on making the Open Source Projects great for the numerous users. Similarly, bloggers receive some incentives to keep blogging: in the case of corporate bloggers, they receive monthly or weekly stipends for helping companies of all sizes market their products and services, or they are given commissions on the number of sales the companies make through their blogging.

Comparatively, the incentives received by Media Executives come in form of their monthly salary, which is quite bigger than the amount earned by an average blogger. The statistics reveal that average media personnel receive anything from $32,000 to $40,000 annually while the salary/wage for bloggers vary considerably; but if quantified, it is somewhere between $12,000 to $22,000 a year, depending on the outfits they are working for.

Social media: A live action

Communication is an essential part of the human life when it comes to interacting and developing our society. Ever since we can remember we have used communications on different forms: sign language, body language, signal language and written language. Today however we have taken communicating to a new level, another form of written language: social media and social networking. This sensation affects us i numerous of ways and nowadays we can access it at all times, because we are carrying it without at all times: through our cell phones. The phenomenon social media is like a coin with two sides: it has both negative and positive consequences. 

communications has been simplified. Never before has it been easier to meet new people and build up new relations with all kinds of people. Through social media it is simple to keep in touch with old friends without even leaving your own home. Social media also creates an opportunity to bring people with common interests together. It also helps people who have a difficulty communicating in person are more comfortable interacting via the Internet. Social media is having an explosive effect on experiential campaigns, creating the potential to multiply thousands of brand interactions into millions. Websites had already become integral to experiential activity, but usually only as a follow-up to an initial interaction, enabling people to source further information or offers. This has changed, and now, thanks to widespread consumer awareness of Twitter and YouTube, for example, the digital element of campaigns can work before, during and after a marketing event. "Digital is joined at the hip to experiential, and is one of the business' biggest growth areas, thanks to its complementary nature”.

The possibilities offered by social networking are exciting brands as they realize how an online conversation can draw in huge numbers of consumers. "If you execute these strategies properly, you attract a huge number of brand ambassadors who are self-recruited and self-motivating”.Consumers taking part in an online quiz received free games, and continued the relationship through Twitter and Facebook. Those attending events can be encouraged to upload photos and video content to networking sites so friends can see what they missed. The key is creating something people want to share.Drinks brands have been adept at exploiting the benefits of amplifying niche experiential activity through social media.

The most agencies research indicates that consumers prefer to go online to interact with brands, especially as smartphones enable them to access the internet quickly while on the move. Some experts argue that social media offers fewer opportunities for products, but, as manufacturers have discovered, consumers are willing to exchange views online about virtually any purchased product. Haircare brand Wella achieved a high level of exposure for an international competition it staged in Berlin, with a three-month buildup gained through Twitter updates and Facebook teasers. The campaign culminated in the release of video blogs and photos of rehearsals at the venue. Updates during the show itself were posted online, and bloggers in different countries referred to it while writing in support of contestants.

Today’s society is faced with the continually growing problem of electronics and social media. What used to be considered a precious treasure is now the cause of teenage obesity, lack of concentration, inadequate communication, and above all a far less intellectual society. Cell phones, internet, video games, television all have taken over the youth in society and corrupted them into unimaginative, unqualified, dull robots. Facebook is merely a tool to drain the intelligence from teenagers until they are forced to speak in instant messaging jargon- LOL, OMG, TTYL. Twitter is a mechanism for teenagers to become hermits, living in their rooms updating their statuses every two minutes. Video games and television suck imagination from children’s minds, their eyes becoming plastered to a small pixel screen, their stationary bodies molded into the couch cushions. To stop a calamity like this from happening, there is only one option- abolish electronics and social media completely. If humanity can wipe away everything with batteries, plugs, and wires, people will become a more intellectual, responsive, exciting species on earth.

Society has overlooked the many other options to solve this growing problem. Having students become educated to perform tasks without calculators, cell phones, or the Internet, raise the price of the most popular, yet least useful electronics, or have schools limit a student’s use of electronics or enforce better rules pertaining to electronics and social media could all be successful solutions but are not acceptable in this busy society. Because of this, abolishing electronics and social media would be the best and only solution to create a thriving society, to save the vivacity and intellect of the next generation of adults- the youth that can be seen at the present moment on cell phones, iPods, Facebook, and Twitter- from mass destruction by the monstrous electronics and social media. Make the right choice and give up your iPods, televisions, computers, and delete your Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter accounts. G2G, TTYL!