Clooney Mooney, Corporate Boogey & Fine Academy 🎓

There are many obvious benefits to taxing the rich - lower inequality, higher government revenue, and better civic amenities. But who knew it could also make better movies. 🎞️

According to a study published in the National Bureau of Economic Research earlier this week, when movie stars like George Clooney are taxed, they make better movies.

Here’s the logic: 

Movie stars obviously fall under the highest tax brackets. When taxes are high, they try to navigate them by financing in high profile, high quality movies. 

More expenses = lower taxable income

The researchers also found that higher taxes correlated with actors appearing in more films that got higher ratings on IMDb, rather than films that simply paid more money. 💰

Quality > Payment 

Several recent examples illustrate this trade-off.

• George Clooney accepted a salary of $3 to write, direct, and star in ‘Good Night, and Good Luck’–a film later nominated for 6 Academy Awards.
• Similarly, Jonah Hill accepted the SAG-AFTRA minimum wage for the opportunity to work with Academy Award-winning director Martin Scorsese on ‘Wolf of Wall Street.

The graph below shows how number of unique movies increased during the 1970s when tax rates went up.

What traditional companies offer: 

• Paid vacation time off 
• Fancy corporate getaways

But since WFH, both of these have lost impact. 

So in a bid to revive vacation and corporate retreat fun, companies have devised a new nightmare. It’s called ‘Bleisure’. 

Bleisure — a portmanteau of “business” and “leisure” — The common practice of tacking vacation time onto business trips is catching the attention of conference organizers.

Companies are pouring cash previously allotted for office rent into corporate events and outstation conferences. These are not your traditional offsites where departments discuss their progress and CFOs share their visions through hour long speeches. 

Instead of yawning in an audience while onstage speakers click through slide decks, these conferences take you:

• Fishing micro-plastics out of a river in Aspen 🎣
• Barhopping around Lisbon 🥂
• Dhow cruise around Dubai to teach you the importance of teamwork (Remember The Office episode?) 🚢

The warmer (and more fun) the destination, the more likely attendees will make a trip out of it, ultimately drawing larger crowds. 

Of course this means that employees will be trading off their vacation days to do trust falls with their boss in Maui.

Last Tuesday, the European Union hosted a virtual party in its own Metaverse. Sponsored by Global Gateway, the metaverse was launched in mid-October with the intent of becoming a “shared digital space” where people disguised as anthropomorphic balloon animals can meet and “reflect on global issues to make a difference for our shared future. 

What was at the party: 

• Though the beach party may have initially seemed crowded, it turned out that most of the avatars present were permanent non-human fixtures—just decorations. 
• In the background, there were graphic text montages displaying the words “climate,” “education,” “public health,” and “digitization.” Basically pavilions or sections for people to go and discuss these issues.
• There were also dolphins perpetually jumping, a soothing tropical bird soundtrack, and some “art” “installations.”

But citizens were either disinterest or annoyed. 

Unfortunately, the EU’s excitement and fancy wasn’t met with the same sentiment as only 6 people showed up to the virtual party. 🎪

Not just this, some people even took to twitter to criticise the government’s investment in a metaverse. The EU reportedly spent nearly $400,000 on the digital metaverse project. To that one irate twitter user wrote the following (see image below).