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In the FT, bit amusing, what the Greeks can do to earn some money. Mind you, carrying this argument forward, I think we can do much from India's perspective by asking people to pay royalty on Zero, the numbers, chess, loads of astronomy and astrology (every horoscope will get an Indian royalty cheque), medicine, metallurgy, town planning and sewage (how about asking for a royalty from every pipe and bog manufacturer? or asking for a penny every time you visit the loo?), so on and so forth. Or from the Brits, they can charge for every tennis racket, or cricket ball or seat, or how about the game of golf or the joint stock company and and and, should promise to be much fun :)

As Greece faces up to the agony of its financial crisis, there can be only one way out. The country must look to the wisdom of its ancestors; not to learn from it, but to sell it.

Greece’s problem is that it has borrowed more than it can afford to pay back. Yet as the cradle of western civilisation, it has an enormous store of riches, perhaps the greatest the world has ever seen. All it needs to do is work out how to monetise those assets.

Much of the best physical capital of Ancient Greece has, unfortunately, already left the country. The Elgin Marbles are in London; the Venus de Milo in Paris. What is left is often not particularly marketable. Renting out the Parthenon to Germany to use as an ammunition dump, as the Turks did in the 1860s, might strain the already tense relations between the two countries just a little too far.

Happily, however, Greece’s stock of intellectual capital is vast, and just waiting for a smart enough lawyer to exploit it. Ancient Greece is a treasure trove of patents and brands, from sportswear to movies.

After recent precedents set in intellectual property cases in Europe and the US, it should not take a Socrates to establish Greece’s right to profit from those ideas. The rest of the world has been living rent-free off the innovations of the ancient Greeks for too long. They have been giving us gifts for centuries; now it is time to give something back.

All Greece needs to do is levy a small royalty on every comedy and tragedy, on every Pythagorean triangle, and on every piece of rhetoric and sophistry. (This article might be liable for a few cents).

If you were to describe this source of revenue as a cornucopia, you could be pursued by copyright lawyers seeking payment for another Greek concept. Attempts to put a tax on every pair of parallel lines would risk a legal tangle; Egypt can also lay a claim to Euclid of Alexandria.

However, there could be no defence for Nike against a demand for compensation for its theft of the brand equity of the goddess of victory. The company might also be forced to include some educational materials in every box of shoes, to inform ignorant teenagers about the debt they owe to Greek culture.

A special punitive rate might be charged for egregiously punning newspaper headlines such as “Acropolis now”.

Admittedly, some of the details may be a little complex, and careful, painstaking public administration has not been one of Greece’s greatest strengths, back to the days of Pericles and Cleon.

Still, those clever people at Goldman Sachs were a great help in coming up with ingenious financial solutions for Greece, and they will no doubt have the perfect plan to get it out of its current mess.

From here.

ouch.

Are rest of the OECD countries listening? they need to attract the young and upcoming lot…As the blog says, the young and mobile are going to move off even more and that will mean that the future tax take is going to suffer until and unless immigration helps. Like hell it will. And if you think that the birth rate is going to help, then think again. Since 2003, the birth rate was 9.79 births per 1000 and it has fallen to 9.45 in 2009. That is a serious drop. In terms of comparison, its 205 on the list of nations. To make matters worse, the old chaps are dying faster, 9.86 in 2003 to now 10.51 in 2009 as the old chaps reach life expectancy and start dying. The country is going to empty out…

I have learnt the hard way that trying to outsource on the basis of “manage my mess for less” is a sure fire way of crashing and burning at worst and being more expensive at best. Anything that is crucial to your firm’s success, you do not outsource. In other words, only outsource which is a commodity and it is easy to switch suppliers such as perhaps storage management, electricity supplies, sewage, catering, cleaning, etc.

Lo and Behold, here’s a paper which provides some more data to back up the idea that outsourcing actually pushes up your costs. The data used is crucial and I quote:

ITOS and IT spending data were obtained from InformationWeek magazine, a weekly print magazine aimed at business technology professionals. Since 1991, InformationWeek has conducted annual surveys to gather current year IT budgets from a variety of the largest US public and private firms and government entities that use IT. It has supplemented this with firms demonstrating innovative use of IT. In 1999, InformationWeek began asking firms what percentage of their IT spending is outsourced. InformationWeek recently provided the additional firm-level data for the 1998 to 2005 time period for this study with strict disclosure restrictions on the authors precluding the sharing of specific firm responses. Data are used from respondents who provided both IT spending and ITOS information for one or more years between 1999 and 2005. Observations for non-public firms were eliminated and merged with corresponding Compustat financial data to calculate the various control variables shown to affect IT budget levels in Kobelsky et al. (2008b). This reduced the overall sample to 1959 firm-year observations for 647 firms in the period 1999 to 2005

The model comprises of variables:

• itb/sls = firm IT budget for each year per InformationWeek data divided by sales for that year (Compustat data12);

• itos dummy = 1 if IT outsourcing percentage per InformationWeek data is positive in Current Year, 0 if not;

• size = log of Current Year sales;

• ind_conc_ratio = four-firm concentration ratio for four-digit SIC;

• uncertainty = standard deviation of earnings before extraordinary items for previous 5 years scaled by sales;

• rel_divers = related diversification (within 2 digit SICs);

• unrel_divers = unrelated diversification (across 2 digit SICs);

• op_ros = operating return on sales, before depreciation (compustat data13/data12);

• debt_ratio = debt ratio (Compustat data9/data6);

• ave_sales_growth = average sales growth for last two years;

• automate = 1 for firms in automate industries, 0 otherwise;

• transform = 1 for firms in transform industries, 0 otherwise;

• hi_tech = 1 if high-tech firm, 0 otherwise;

• lo_tech = 1 if low-tech firm, 0 otherwise.

• year = 1 for each year 2000-2005, 0 otherwise.

What kind of a human being does this? Forget about war crimes and murder, this is behaviour of a human being whose humanity has been burnt away by what? I quote:

The most shocking testimony in the new Breaking the Silence report, I think, is number 95. A female Border Police sergeant describes how the guys would catch Palestinian kids trying to sneak into Israel to sell cheap little toys: 
It was simply routine – emptying the children’s plastic bags and playing with their toys. You know, grabbing the stuff and throwing the toys among us like balls.
Q: The children cried?
Constantly. They cried and were terrified. I mean, you couldn’t miss it.
Q: Adults cried too?
Sure. To humiliate them. One of our goals was this: I made him cry in front of his child, I made him shit in his pants.
Q: You saw cases of people soiling their pants?
Yes.
Q: Why?
Especially at beatings, beating them to a pulp and threats and yelling, where the guy is terrified, especially in front of the kids... There was this once, again, an adult detained with his child, a tiny kid, about four years old. The child was not hit, but the patrolman was annoyed that the adult was taking the kid with him so he’d be shown consideration, and told him: “You’re taking the kid along so as to be pitied. Let’s show you what’s what.” And he beat him to a pulp, yelled at him, said: “Why, I could kill you right in front of your kid. Maybe you’d feel more...”
Q: And he wet his pants for sheer fright?
Yes.
Q: In front of his child?
Yes. There are lots of horror stories like, I made him shit in his pants, I made him do that. Such talk was routine, not anything special...

And this is being done by Israeli Women. I am puzzled. Seriously puzzled. Why? Why are you like this? How can you look yourself in your face after destroying the innocence of a child? Is this what you are? You are not really human are you? This isn't human behaviour. You terrified a child, not once or twice but constantly? Is that what you do to your own child? Your little brother and sister? Or was this done to you by your parents? Is this endemic in the Israeli Army? Why? I am ashamed of you while being deeply puzzled at your unthinking brutality towards children. And Karma does exist, what goes around comes around.