A Nobel Economist's Plan To Tax Digital Ads
Better Offline
Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 687 Ratings
🗓️ 30 October 2024
⏱️ 33 minutes
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Summary
In this episode, Ed Zitron is joined by Daron Acemoglu, MIT Economist and recent winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, to talk about his daring - and likely effective - plan to tax all digital advertising revenue over $500m at 50% as well as how we might adjust incentives to bring big tech under control.
PAPER: https://shapingwork.mit.edu/research/the-urgent-need-to-tax-digital-advertising/
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed human. |
| 0:06.7 | Hello and welcome to Better Offline. |
| 0:10.5 | I'm your host, Ed Zittron. |
| 0:25.1 | Back in March of this year, MIT Economist, Deroen S. M.M.O.Glu and M.T. Sloan, Simon Johnson, published a paper |
| 0:29.7 | called The Urgent Need to Tax Digital Advertising, where digital advertisers will be levied with a flat tax |
| 0:35.1 | of 50% on all revenue above $500 million. |
| 0:38.4 | And today am joined by Daronne to walk through it. |
| 0:40.5 | Daron, thank you for coming on. |
| 0:41.8 | Thank you. |
| 0:42.3 | Thanks, Ed. |
| 0:42.7 | It's my pleasure. |
| 0:44.4 | So walk me through the idea. |
| 0:46.8 | It seems pretty simple, but maybe there's more nuance to it. |
| 0:49.6 | Well, it's very simple to implement. |
| 0:51.2 | It's very simple to explain. |
| 0:52.8 | The question is why. |
| 0:55.5 | You know, why do something like this? You know, after all, who doesn't love something free? And we're getting |
| 1:00.3 | a lot of free things because the entire online ecosystem is monetized via digital ads. |
| 1:09.9 | Right. The issue is, I think this ecosystem creates a number of problems, |
| 1:18.2 | which are set to get worse with AI. |
| 1:22.4 | Right. |
... |
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