How to Put a Price on a Bird: the Forgotten Science of Economic Ornithology
Odd Lots
Bloomberg
4.5 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 1 March 2024
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This episode is for the birds — and one bird in particular. Flaco, an Eurasian eagle-owl, escaped from the Central Park Zoo last year and went on to become a local celebrity, delighting New Yorkers with his feathered adventures across Manhattan. Late last month, however, Flaco died after an apparent collision with a building. Obviously, Flaco's death is a sad event for many reasons, but it got us thinking about the role of birds in the wider world. Not only are they an important part of the natural ecosystem, but they can also contribute to agriculture (or quality of life in the city) by eating bugs, rats and other pests. So can you put an exact dollar amount on the value of a bird and what it does for the world? It turns out that for many decades, some economists were devoted to exactly this question. In this episode, we speak with Robert Francis, the author of the Bird History Substack, about the largely forgotten science of economic ornithology and historic attempts to figure out exactly how much a bird is worth.
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| 0:00.0 | How is Gen AI impacting the tax function? |
| 0:03.3 | Here are some thoughts from EY and real-time insights. |
| 0:06.7 | The best way I can analogize if you think back to 30 years ago with spreadsheets |
| 0:10.1 | at that point in time most tax planning and processes were done with a pencil paper and a calculator. |
| 0:15.0 | But everyone thought that was going to remove the need for tax professionals. |
| 0:18.0 | The reality is that they learned how to code spreadsheets. |
| 0:20.0 | They learned how to build better business insights, worse scenarios, and years later there's more |
| 0:24.0 | tax jobs than ever. |
| 0:25.0 | And so we see AI is having the same impact. |
| 0:28.0 | Learn more at EY.com. |
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| 0:44.4 | We answer fascinating questions about business, tech, and history. |
| 0:47.8 | Questions like, why are drug dealers putting fentanyl on everything? |
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| 1:17.0 | Podcasts, Radio News. Hello and welcome'm Joe Wiesenthall. |
| 1:35.0 | I'm Tracy Allaway. |
| 1:37.6 | And I'm Joe Wiesenthal. |
| 1:39.0 | Joe, did you hear the sad news? |
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