Not OP, but also used the API for music discovery, crawling the related artists network from playlists I'd created to find highly connected nodes. I found that strategy was very efficient at filling blind spots in major genres I listened to, and reasonably good at exploring random niches, but generally wasn't the place I found songs that felt truly fresh to me. It felt like it got noticeably worse about 5 years ago, when I perceived them to have ramped up the payola, but that might just be in my head.
The major costs you're missing are marketing and "plate" (up front cost to produce the content). Those make up most of the total costs. For textbooks, the decision makers are professors (so door-to-door sales to get their attention), and the market is pretty small, especially for upper level content (so few units to amortize fixed costs over). Print, paper, and binding are cheap, say ~$10-12 average for a textbook. Typically, distribution channel takes a 20-25%, depending on channel partner, and many colleges mandate that sales go through the school bookstore because they get a cut, so publisher's website isn't necessarily a viable option (without a lot of student marketing). Author royalties run ~13-15% of revenue, and editors hit plate expense (they're publisher employees, so not a variable cost like authors). Textbook publisher Ebitda margins wind up running 20-25%, but most publisher's pay a lot of interest expense, partly because the major costs are up front, and partly because there's been a lot of PE ownership. Net margins can be tight as anyone else's.
Source: worked for a plaintiff publisher in this case. Think Pearson, Cengage, and MHE all publish financials also.
The chart you linked stops before it gets to the cohort discussed in the article. The youngest cohort shown is the 25-34 cohort in 2016 would have been born in 1982-1991 ("gen y"/"millenials"). The economist article is discussing the cohort born starting in 1997. It seems to think the chart gets rosier for the young.
Fair point on data comparability. The trend (younger generations substantially worse off) is pretty clear though.
> It seems to think the chart gets rosier for the young.
That seems comical optimistic to me. Between gig economy, covid and rising cost of living, unaffordable housing, college loans I struggle to see the young ones building rapid wealth all of a sudden. If anything id expect even worse than where that chart stops.
When a company goes into bankruptcy, they still have assets (inventory, a brand, real estate, customer contracts) -- those things just belong to their creditors now. The new owners need _someone_ to manage selling all those things to recoup some money.
More often, though, the business is still worth more than the sum of its parts. It just wasn't making enough to pay the loans it'd taken out. Since the loans get eliminated in bankruptcy, the new owners might decide to just keep running the company (and want a new CEO, who they think will do a better job.
It does, but it can be expensive enough as to be prohibitive [0]. For example, offices tend to have fewer water hookups, fewer breakers (meaning high construction costs to repurpose) and wide floors (meaning lots of windowless units).
They can be, and that's a statement about the distribution and consistency of skill in those activities. I see little reason to believe those distributions apply to SAT taking or general capacity to learn (which is what you're really aspiring to measure).
If we set up an ELO league for best-of-three rock paper scissors, I'd expect score to diverge over sufficiently many hours, but would give almost even odds to a 99th v 93rd percentile candidate.
Stay bonuses [1] are probably the most common case. It's actually pretty common in a merger, especially one with a long period between announcement and integration, to hand out parachutes of various metals to key employees.
If you're the CEO closing a deal where the buying party is overpaying by $15B, they really really don't want you to quit in the middle.
If you're a rock star category manager, they still want you to stick around because you might get the job after in the combined entity, and even if you won't, who will they be able to hire to manage the category while they're doing the deal?
Not much. Most peers and hiring managers stopped paying attention to these ratings when they got into college, so the market's perception of your degree is some blended average of the programs' ratings over the past ~40 years. By the time rankings after you matriculated represent a meaningful portion of the average, your alma mater is no longer a particularly relevant part of your resume.
IANAL, but my understanding is that the default rule in the US is "each party pays for their own lawyers, regardless of who wins"[0]. Of course, the specifics would depend on the actual terms of the settlement agreement.
That is the standard American rule. However for this reason, most consumer protection statute include a provision where the prevailing consumer gets their attorneys fees. Otherwise consumers would be left without representation.
