Cash is the enemy of creativity!
The Founder and CEO of King of Shaves, Will King gave an engaging and dynamic presentation to a large audience of economics and business students at our Entrepreneurship Society last night. The UK sales figures for the new Azor razors are quite remarkable and are testimony to the impact that this challenger brand is having on a monopolistic/duopolistic market. In the past four weeks in the UK KoS has sold 107,000+ Azor system razor handles and 602,000+ Azor Endurium cartridges.
Conventional MBA theory would suggest that the barriers to entry are just too high for a new firm to dislocate and disrupt the cosy market power of Gillette and Wilkinson Sword. The razor remains of the most patent protected products in the world and the billions of blades sold each year (at profit margin of over 90 per cent) represent an enormous cash cow for the US shaving giants. But easy cash can often stifle genuine creativity. The momentum of passionate and persistent challenger brands who truly understand the web and who talk to customers in a different way can make a big difference. The big Mo is with King of Shaves and it is easy to see why!
Will reports on his visit here
Our next meeting (Thursday 12th November) focuses on global economics and is with Paul Donovan, Chief Economist of UBS.
Rated: 
(4/5), based on 1 review
Tim Harford at the Keynes Society
We are delighted to have the Undercover Economist Tim Harford returning to the Keynes Society on Thursday 19th November at 8-45pm in Upper School. Hot on the heels of his hugely successful books The Undercover Economist and The Logic of Life, Tim has made a timely and swift return to the top of the book charts with Dear Undercover Economist: The Very Best Letters from the “Dear Economist” Column: The Undercover Economist Solves Life’s Everyday Mysteries and Problems. Tim’s ability to connect with his audience and make Economics appealing, relevant and thought provoking is well established - it should be another super evening. A warm welcome is extended to teaching colleagues. We are likely to be pretty full for this meeting so if you are coming and plan to bring some students.
Paul Donovan at the Keynes Society
On Thursday 12th September we are delighted to welcome Paul Donovan, Chief Economist of UBS to speak at the Keynes (Economics) Society. Paul is a very highly rated city economist and a tremendous speaker. It should be a terrific opportunity to take the pulse of where the global economy is at this crucial stage of the cycle and just fifteen months after the meltdown in financial markets. A warm welcome is extended to teaching colleagues for this meeting. Please if you would like to come and if you plan to bring some students along. The meeting starts at 8-45pm in the Egerton Room, Eton and lasts one hour.
The economist’s new clothes
This superb article from Stephanie Flanders provides a great discussion in her Stephanomics blog on the discipline of Economics from the view of some big hitters including Scholes (of Black-Schole options fame); Charlie Bean (of Bank of England fame); Lord Skidelsky (of Keynes fame); and Thaler (of Nudge fame).
IB Economics - Improving Evaluation Skills
Here is a streamed version of the presentation I gave to the Hong Kong CPD day, focusing on how IB Economics students can improve their evaluation skills:
Rated: (3/5), based on 4 reviews
tutor2u in Hong Kong
Eye weary and groggy from some fine Cathay Pacific house red, I have just landed hot foot from Hong Kong where I was the guest of Sha Tin College and a meeting of the Economics and Business Teaching Group from the English Schools Federation in Hong Kong.
The whistlestop tour was great fun and I must thank everyone there for their warm welcome and superb organisation, not least Paul Hoang and his colleagues who put on the two day student conference and CPD event at their fine school.
I will be posting some of the materials used in the Economics and IB blogs in the coming days....once the red leaves my system.
Rated: (5/5), based on 2 reviews
Paul Mason on the Wall Street Crash
Paul Mason - BBC Newsnight’s Economics Editor - is running a series of reports this week to mark the 80th anniversary of the Wall Street Crash. They are likely to be superb and a great resource for students and teachers. Here are the links to Paul’s output.
What caused the Wall Street Crash? (11 mins)
How the crash changed everything (13 mins)
Soros launches new economic think tank
For many years the billionaire George Soros has been a trenchant critic of neo-liberal free market fundamentalism. He has developed his own theory of reflexivity - a variant on behavioural economics thinking - which stresses the importance of perceptions in markets and powerful feedback effects. The FT describes his theory as one where ‘ financial markets tend to influence perceptions of reality, which in turn feed back into markets.’
Now Soros has announced that he is putting $50m into a new think tank - the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) - one of the aims is a moving away from the dominance of high level mathematics in university courses (a seriously good move in my opinion) towards giving students stronger insights in behavioural traits and the importance of politics and history in driving how people operate in real markets. According to Soros “The (economic) dogma has lost touch with reality.”
NET’s founding Advisory Board members include Nobel laureates George Akerlof (famous for his work on the market for lemons and asymmetric information) and Sir James Mirrlees, Michael Spence and Joseph Stiglitz, Willem Buiter (from the LSE) Ian Goldin (seen here giving a talk at TED) Charles Goodhart (creator of Goodhart’s law) Anatole Kaletsky (arch-contrarian from the Times) John Kay (from the FT) global economics experts Ken Rogoff and Jeffrey Sachs. Quite a powerful list of people - all of whom are never happy to accept the conventional wisdom.
This is an economics think tank worth keeping a weather eye on.
Lessons from an Ad Man - Superb microeconomics!
The wonderful Rory Sutherland wows the audience at the TED conference in Oxford with a superb sixteen minute talk on advertising and aspects of behavioural economics. It is an immensely watchable video that will allow you to discuss with your students concepts such as perceived value, symbolic value,intangible value, hedonic opportunity cost and some ideas for nudging personal behaviour in socially beneficial ways. We learn of the extraordinary value of placebos, the rebranding of the potato in Prussian Germany. That all value is subjective and that persuasion is better than compulsion. Some super examples too of Veblen Goods, price discrimination and how the framing of the Italian penalty points system for drivers in Italy has a different impact than for motorists in the UK.
Rated: (5/5), based on 10 reviews
New Edition of Etonomics
The latest edition of our school economics magazine Etonomics has just been published. There are articles on digital economics, the national lottery and behavioural economics, game theory and climate change, the future for world aviation, microfinance and the inevitability (or otherwise) of economic recessions.
A download can be requested here:
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