Tag Archive for: economics

The Value And Demand For Taxpayer Dollars

Don’t Worry, Be Happy – Bobby McFerrin

In May 2020, CA Gov. Gavin Newsom said he wasn’t worried about Tesla leaving the state.  Last month, when Elon Musk announced he was moving Tesla to TX, the Gov. changed his tune.  It seems he felt he helped create the company, citing the tax breaks he gave them.

Hypernomics has seen this argument before.  Breaks in CA usually amount to slight and temporary reductions in the business-crushing tax rates CA has compared to other states.  That’s why companies by the thousands have been leaving CA.  A legislative “solution” to lost tax revenue is to have CA tax requirements follow businesses and individuals once they leave the state.  But that 1) denies some tax monies to other jurisdictions and 2) makes it less likely for new companies to enter CA.

CA has the best weather in the US, but the Tax Foundation ranks it next to last in its business climate.  As hypothesized below, the Value to taxpayers increases with the physical and business environments. Increasing the latter’s Value makes it more appealing to taxpayers – if they are attracted enough to come into the state, they offer more Ways for CA to get needed tax dollars.  At the same time, all mature markets have Demand Frontiers, which deliver the Means by which they must abide.  It’d take lots of work to learn these forces in detail. But avoiding that effort leads to unpleasant surprises.

And worry.

#hypernomics #innovation #taxpayer #taxanalysis #markets #economics

Chasing the 8th Dimension

“May I pass along my congratulations for your great interdimensional breakthrough? I am sure, in the miserable annals of the Earth, you will be duly enshrined.”
Lord John Whorfin, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai

In the film named for him, rockstar, brain surgeon, and test pilot Buckaroo Banzai drives a pickup through a mountain and enters the 8th Dimension. That geometry seems impossible to imagine.

Or is it?

Hypernomics studies nonnegative market and mathematical dimensions. Without needing to navigate negative regions or physics, new coordinate systems open up for us.

As we see in A, we can portray missiles in a 4D system like the one we used for general aviation planes in the last post. Separately we can do the same in B for bombers. But, are they separate? The 4 dimensions portraying the missile market match the number needed for bombers. But since both share price as a nominally vertical axis that links them (Dimension 3), we can reuse that line, as in C. Here 4 + 4 = 7 dimensions.

How do we get to 8 dimensions? Figure C represents a snapshot in time. If we trace a path through several such views at different intervals, we add time to the mix, reaching the 8th Dimension.

#innovation #hypernomics #economics #markets

3 + 2 = 4

No one is so brave that he is not disturbed by something unexpected
Julius Caesar

It’s disturbing to think that 3+2 won’t equal 5. Or that markets are unlike space and begin with four dimensions. Or that we might discover images that disagree with paradigms held for over 100 years. But what happens if we use Hypernomics to take a new look at an old problem?

Let’s see.

Suppose we want to see how customers value products. Specifically, let’s consider the three aircraft models in Figure A. We’ll want to examine features that might be important to customers, here, Max MPH and Seats. Those features mandate a pair of horizontal axes; their combined effects drive a third vertical axis, that for Price, making three ordered triples.

At the same time, we may want to plot each model’s quantity sold as a horizontal dimension and couple it with its associated Price on the vertical dimension for three ordered pairs, as we see in Figure B.

But the three dimensions of Value Space are not straight additions to the two dimensions of the Demand Plane. Instead, as C reveals, 3D Value Spaces and 2D Demand Planes share the Price Axis, forming 4D structures, thus 3+2=4. Four dimensions offer more insight. Time adds a fifth dimension.

#innovation #hypernomics #economics #markets

Worth Every Penny – Not Enough Pennies

There are several ways to sink a new project.  A common method is to ask potential customers about their willingness to buy an offering and then suppose some fraction of the resulting sum is viable.  In the 1960s, surveys indicated there was a market for 200-300 supersonic Concorde airliners.

They built 20.

Decades later, multiple companies are entering this market again. One of them, Aerion, is building its AS2 bizjet (A), selling for $120M.  Suppose we compile and analyze a dataset of all business aircraft that cruise at 400 MPH or more.  We’ll then find a production possibility curve for planes worth $120M as shown in B (that curve has an adjusted R^2 of 97.5%, a standard error of $10.1M, and P-values of 6.11E-43 and 1.02E-19 for Cabin Volume and Max MPH, respectively).  By this measure, the AS2, over ten standard deviations above the line, is worth every penny.

However, in C, we find that the market only supported 55 business aircraft worth $80M or more for a decade, up only slightly from a like study done for the same duration done five years earlier (with 46 planes over $80M).

Five years ago, Aerion announced an order for 20 units. They have the same number today.

#innovation #markets #future #economics