Marketplace - American Public Media

It’s six o’clock in the morning. The sun rises over a park at the eastern end of the Street of Eternal Happiness. The only signs of life are singing birds.

And dancing seniors.

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It’s a ritual repeated at parks throughout China every morning: Line after elderly line, proceeding through the motions of morning exercises in unison. Sixty-three-year-old Tu Dongxiu is off to the side of the group, dancing on her own. "Once I begin to dance, I put all my troubles behind me," Tu says with a chuckle. "I don’t have high blood pressure, diabetes, nothing. If I keep dancing, I won’t ever have to see a doctor!"

And that’s part of the reason so many seniors like Tu return here every morning. If they don’t, at some point they’ll end up five miles due West, where the Street of Eternal Happiness ends, at Shanghai's Huashan Hospital. The only dancing here in the hospital's arena-sized lobby is the side-step shuffle around thousands of patients, waiting to see a doctor.

Patients like Yao Jinlian, who arrived here at five this morning from the countryside. It’s now noon, and she’s still waiting. "My limbs hurt, and I get migraines. Sometimes I can’t even walk," says Yao. "I’ve spent more than 10,000 dollars out of my own pocket for dozens of visits to the neurologist over the past two years."

Like nearly all Chinese, Yao is covered by a state health insurance plan. But she’s discovered that it doesn’t pay for much of her treatment. Yao and her husband Tang Jin Lin say that after two years in and out of hospitals, her doctors still don’t know what’s wrong with her.

"It’s useless!" yells Tang, "They’re just trying to check her quickly, prescribe some drugs, and move on to the next patient. They’re not trying to figure out what’s really wrong with her," he says. Yao interrupts her husband: "We’ve gone through all of our retirement savings seeing these doctors."

Yao has come face-to-face with one of the biggest challenges of China’s healthcare system. Public hospitals in China don’t receive enough funding from the government, so doctors are forced to look elsewhere for money.

Gordon Liu is the director of Peking University’s China Center for Health Economic Research and says Chinese doctors commonly supplement their incomes by prescribing drugs many patients don’t need.

"The reason that many doctors are partially paid through kickbacks and under-the-table payment is mainly because the doctors are positioned as government officers, so their salaries have not been increased comparably," says Liu.

Liu says a typical doctor at a Chinese hospital makes less than a thousand U.S. dollars a month. Receiving kickbacks for drug sales can increase their salaries exponentially. The practice is so widespread that it’s coined the popular Chinese phrase Yi Yao Yang Yi: Feeding hospitals by selling drugs.

But there are other ways Chinese doctors make extra money. Retired Communist Party official Cui Ji and his wife slowly walk out of Huashan hospital onto the Street of Eternal Happiness. The 87-year-old Cui says it bothers him that doctors also expect traditional Chinese red envelopes stuffed with cash before they perform an operation.

"Bribes like this are common. It makes us feel scared for our lives if we don’t give the doctor a red envelope before surgery," says Cui. "Saving lives and curing diseases is a doctor’s duty, not taking bribes. There’s no way I’d ever give a bribe to these doctors."

As Cui says this, his wife, Lang Wenjin, chuckles. She has news for him.

"He doesn’t know this, but last time he got an operation, our daughter slipped the doctor a red envelope right before his surgery," she says, giggling.

It’s a type of corruption even the unwilling have a hard time escaping. That’s why many seniors opt out of China’s health care system altogether by exercising religiously, like a group back on the opposite end of the Street of Eternal Happiness.

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Xu Chengyin spends his morning at the park spinning a Diabolo -- also known as a Chinese Yo-Yo -- balancing it on a string held by two sticks. The 65-year-old was diagnosed with diabetes 10 years ago, he’s run out of money to pay the medical bills, so he comes here each day to try and stay as healthy as he can.

"All of us here must exercise. We simply can’t afford a hospital visit. Our retirement salaries are just a few hundred dollars a month. Once you get ill, you’re finished," says Xu.

Rather than counting his days left, says Xu, he’d rather be here, counting along with the morning exercise routine alongside dozens of others on the Street of Eternal Happiness.

You’ve got your Netflix subscription and maybe you also pay for music services like Pandora or Spotify. Well, YouTube might end up on your monthly bill to pay too.

The world’s largest video site is expected to release a subscription model for some of the content on YouTube. The details are sketchy but before you panic, let’s be clear: The vast majority of YouTube videos are expected to remain free.

And you know how that works, right? If I go on YouTube and want to watch a video, then I have to sit through an ad. It’s an advertising model that’s ripped from traditional TV.

The only problem is that while sales of online video ads are growing, they’re still just a $4 billion market, said Clark Fredricksen, a researcher at eMarketer. “The television market is a $65 billion market,” Fredricksen said.

So how does YouTube catch up? Last year, the online video giant shelled out $200 million to launch a handful of channels. Some like The Onion and Jamie Oliver’s Food Tube are popular. But the word is, many of the shows are expensive to produce and they’re having a hard time making money off of ads.

The subscription model might help, said Colin Gillis, an analyst at BGC partners. “By moving, or at least trying to see if there’s subscription revenue base out there that can help drive more quality content, that’s something they’re willing to try,” Gillis said.

Google, which owns YouTube, says subscription fees aren’t a matter of “if” but “when.” And the word is that they’re only expected to apply to about 50 channels.

Sameet Sinha, an analyst at B. Riley and Company, doesn’t expect subscriptions to turn-off users. “More and more people are getting used to it that if we want higher quality then we have to somehow pay for it,” Sinha said.

He adds that Netflix and Hulu have taught users to pay. So now, YouTube’s challenge is to make sure that the price is right.  

Next week, network and cable TV channels will debut their fall line-ups in the hope of snagging advertising money. But some story lines are already emerging: Comedy is king.

USA Network has paid more than $1 million an episode to acquire reruns of the ABC hit "Modern Family." It’s a big bet for a cable channel known for dramas. And it’s a bet on a sitcom that doesn’t have a laugh track. As corny as it may sound, laugh tracks are still valuable to a comedy’s success. 

Most TV shows used to be filmed in front of a live audience, so viewers could hear the crowd's reactions. The laugh track was born in 1950 to mimic that experience or enhance the audience reaction.

"A guy named Charley Douglass invented the machine, it’s kind of like a big pipe organ with pedals and dials," says Tom Adams, research director for media at IHS Electronics and Media.

Tim Brooks, a TV historian and former network executive, says laugh tracks speak to the fact that we are social animals.

"The laugh track was meant to communicate that sense of community and that theatrical experience," he says. "People enjoyed shows more where there was some laughter going on."

Brooks says laugh tracks went a little bit off the rails in the '60s and '70s.

"One would be loud and the next would be louder, it was very annoying and distracting," he says. Brooks points to some of the later episodes of "Happy Days" as an example. He says laugh tracks fell out of vogue for a time after that, but soon found their way back in to the business.

If you think laugh tracks and live audiences are old fashioned, you have only to look at the top rated comedies right now, Brooks adds. "Two And A Half Men" and "The Big Bang Theory" both have live audiences (and edit their laughs). There are, of course, hit comedies that don’t use laugh tracks or studio audiences. Brooks says those are typically comedies that have more complicated plots and subtler humor, like "Arrested Development," "Modern Family" or "The Office."

But even for those shows, people crave that community experience, and networks are looking at different ways to create it. To that end, ABC has developed the Social Soundtracker app (which will debut in the next few weeks) where viewers can share their reactions live though Facebook.

"You have five sentiments to choose from, we started with five," says Maya Baratz, head of new products at ABC News. "We have a laugh button, we have a 'boo' button, we have an 'awww' button, we have a gasp button."

People using the app hear a mix of the reactions of fellow-watchers -- kind of an app-track, if you will.

TV historian Tim Brooks says laugh tracks will stick around in some form or another, because we do want that sense of community and togetherness, even if we just want to be alone with our TVs.

Pfizer wants you to buy more Viagra. In a first for the pharmaceutical industry, the drug maker says it will sell its erectile dysfunction medicine directly to patients from the company website.

Why, you might ask is Pfizer doing this?

Well, it needs to boost its own... performance.

Sales performance, that is. Really does anyone want to stride up to the pharmacy and fill their Viagra prescription? No.

But Pfizer’s decision isn’t as much about protecting a guy’s pride as it’s about protecting profits and fending off rivals.

“Certainly Cialis is eating into shares, especially among the people who sit in bathtubs,” says Les Funtleyder, a health care analyst with the investment firm Poliwogg.

Viagra’s annual sales are $2 billion, a little less than half the erectile dysfunction market it created and once dominated.  

Funtleyder says Pfizer’s not just fighting Cialis here, there’s also the knockoffs. “The other thing is you have seen significant counterfeiting.”

We’ve all gotten the crazy emails.

Subject: Say, I can have sex all night long.

Message: Just buy must have medication called Viagra. Cheapest prices, instant shipping worldwide. Secure purchases here.

Pharmaceutical analyst Rick Edmunds with Booz & Company says the move should help Pfizer distance itself from the counterfeiting and brush up its image at the same time.

“It’s got an implication well beyond just lost sales. It’s got an implication around how the public views the effectiveness of product,” he says.

Edmunds says it’s too soon to know whether this will prop up Pfizer’s sales.

But to sweeten the deal, the drug maker -- stealing a page from the online knockoffs -- promises 30 percent off your second order.

The Victoria Memorial in Calcutta is one of Eastern India's most popular tourist sites, and hundreds of thousands of tourists come to see it every year.

But now, fewer tourists are coming to see the magnificent white building, dedicated to the former British monarch Queen Victoria, and the attached museum.

Overall, the number of foreigners visiting India has declined by 25 percent, in the last few months, according to the Indian Chamber of Commerce. After the gang rape of a Swiss tourist in March, and a series of other attacks in the city means travel agents are finding many women in particular are canceling trips to India.

Anne Boomers from Holland, is backpacking round India and says it's not easy for women to travel in the country. "A lot of men do expect different things from you. They try to grope you, or just some staring and hinting." All this, Anne says, is "not good for India."

Tourism is a multi-billion dollar industry for India, and last year nearly seven million people visited the country. But it's feared that if these attacks keep happening, and women are continually made to feel uncomfortable when visiting the country, the number or tourists will continue to decline.

To help combat the problem, Calcutta is setting up a tourist police force. The hope is that this will halt kind of attacks that are putting visitors off, and stem the decline of tourist numbers.

The world's first gun made almost entirely on a 3D printer has been fired in the United States. Cody Wilson, a Texas law student, has been working on the project for over a year.

"It felt good to make it, but it felt better to shoot it," Wilson says.
 
Wilson's company Defense Distributed had to clear several hurdles for permits in Austin Texas. And an original company that lent him a 3D printer repossessed it after concerns that making a weapon freely available would circumvent gun control laws. Wilson says that was his plan all along.

Basically we are approaching an age where personalized manufactur[ing] and freedom of information on the Internet will allow the production of things that otherwise -- socially, democratically -- [we] might not have access to," Wilson says.
 
Wilson says people are already downloading schematics for the plastic weapon, called the "liberator." But the gun needs a metal firing pin to work.

One way to evaluate the health of an economy is to look at the jobs picture, which looks pretty rosy so far this spring. But there’s another sign to keep any eye on: the availability of credit.

Julia Coronado, chief economist with BNP Paribas, joins Marketplace Morning Report host David Brancaccio to discuss the credit markets and access to loans.

YouTube will reportedly start charging around $1.99 a month for certain channels -- not for the cats on skateboards, but high quality produced content.

As getting into college becomes ever more competitive, more students are spending the summers creating fodder for college applications.

Congress is expected to consider a bill this week to amend the Fair Labor Standards Act. But some say the proposed changes are anything but fair. The bill, called the Working Families Flexibility Act, would give private employers the right to offer hourly workers paid time off instead of overtime.

India's supreme court has approved what will be that country's biggest nuclear power plant. Though a judge in the case assured the public the new plant will be safe and is "necessary for the welfare and economic growth of India", nuclear power remains controversial in the country.

The BBC's Yogita Limaye in Mumbai joins Marketplace Morning Report host David Brancaccio with the latest.

A number of recent studies suggest that a higher percentage of African Americans use Twitter compared with other races. Now The Root, an online magazine written from an African-American perspective, is looking to tap into that with a new Twitter aggregator.

The Chatterati, a new webpage that watches Twitter users, phrases and hashtags trending in the black community, went live at The Root last week. Its deputy editor Lauren Williams says the site brings focus to topics that can get drowned out by traditional media.

Williams joins Marketplace Tech host Ben Johnson to discuss the new site, its creation, and how it hopes to change the conversation.

Top stories from 'The Chatterati' on May 6, 2013.

Congress is expected to consider a bill this week to amend the Fair Labor Standards Act. But some say the proposed changes are anything but fair. The bill, called the Working Families Flexibility Act, would give private employers the right to offer hourly workers paid time off instead of overtime.

For a lot of low-paid hourly workers, taking time off just isn't going to happen. The proposed bill would solve that problem, says Rae Chornenky, president of the National Federation of Republican Women. Instead of getting overtime pay, workers can get comp time to stay home with a sick kid, for example.

"When these are parents, many times single parents, to have that choice, it's the most important part of the act," Chornenky says.

But Joan Williams, director of the Center for WorkLife Law, says the proposal isn't family friendly.

"This bill is a wolf in sheep's clothing," she says.

Williams says it would let employers off the hook from having to pay time and a half for overtime. There might be time off for extra hours, "but the comp time is at a ratio of 1-to-1, not 1-to-1.5," Williams says.

And cheap overtime, Williams says, means more overtime. What happens when workers can't work those extra hours? Williams says, often, they get fired.

If you make office supplies, you know you've arrived when your product hits the shelves at Staples. The retail chain says it will start carrying the Cube 3D printer made by 3D Systems. The printer is priced at $1,299.99. 

Max Bogue, co-founder of the company that invented the 3D printing pen 3Doodler, thinks the move will help small businesses interested in trying out the new technology.

"Mainly it would be small businesses that are looking to do prototyping, and who would see the advantage of having a major retailer, like Staples, supporting a 3D printer," Bogue says.

It's still too early to tell whether 3D printing will take off, or if another innovation come along and render it moot (just ask a fax machine how it feels about the Internet). The Cube 3D is available online at Staples.com now and hits stores in June. The printers work with Mac or Windows operating systems and come with templates for things like baskets and chess pieces.

YouTube will reportedly start charging around $1.99 a month for certain channels -- not for the cats on skateboards, but high quality produced content. 

Sources tell the Financial Times that the subscription service may apply to as many as 50 channels, although it’s not known which channels those may be.

Some of YouTube’s partner channels include The Onion, the Howcast channel, and BBC Worldwide On Earth. 

The line between network TV, cable, and online content has been blurring for a while now -- charging for online video is hardly new. 

“Netflix has proven that there's certainly a large base of consumers willing to pay for streaming content over the web,” says Brian Wieser with Pivotal Research.

YouTube would also be cashing in on a huge infrastructure that so far has only been used to draw eyeballs for ads.

“What they’re really doing is capitalizing on what’s probably billions of dollars of infrastructure costs,” says Wieser, “the delivery, distribution, storage of vast quantities of video.”

The move to paid subscriptions has been hinted at for some time. In February, computer programmers discovered code in YouTube’s Android app that indicated the company was developing subscription infrastructure.

YouTube’s ad revenue grew by more than 50 percent last year according to Pivotal Research, and is expected to grow another 50 percent this year. That plus subscriptions could bring in $15 billion within a few years. 

There's another positive economic indicator to add to last Friday's jobs report.

It comes courtesy of the American Gaming Association, which in its annual report (PDF) out today said consumer spending at commercial casinos was up almost five percent last year -- Just over $37 billion.

Yes, gambling and its ills are well known. But if people feel like they've got money to burn, that is a good thing, right?

Today marks the two-year anniversary of the so-called ‘flash crash.’ That’s when one enormous futures trade triggered a sell-off, sending the Dow down by more than five percent in minutes.

While some blame automated trading systems for the ‘flash crash,’ technology is also behind the solution. If a company’s share price drops by 10 percent in a few minutes, trading in the stock is automatically limited.

“These mechanisms will either stop trading or make sure that trading doesn’t fall outside of a narrowly defined range so the market can always be at a rational place,” says Bill O’Brien is CEO of Direct Edge, the nation’s third largest stock exchange.

“That’s really one of the benefits of technology in the marketplace. You can make these corrections much more quickly had you had to enforce them manually,” says O’Brien.

Technology can’t be blamed for volatility, says Adam Sussman, a partner at the research firm, TABB Group.

“It hasn’t changed. It’s just that the time period over which those events occur have compressed from hours to minutes," Sussman says. He adds the market is safer now that orders are limited to a certain amount above or below the stock’s current price.

“The idea is that it’s a better protection against a fat-finger error, where someone is entering the wrong price. We’ve often seen that roil the markets,” he says.

But MIT finance professor Andrei Kirilenko doesn’t agree.

“I think the markets are no more safer now than they were then,” says Kirilenko. He says regulators need to catch up with the technology -- instead of regulating human traders, we should begin to regulate the software behind the automated trades.

For those of us well past high school, summer break has become hard to recognize. While we may have spent those months working summer  jobs, or hanging out at the town pool, that kind of low-key summer, is, well, history.

Donny Wise, a father of two, in Brentwood, California says for his son's summer doesn’t mean an end to academics.
 
“This particular summer, my son is planning on studying geometry, traveling a little bit, out of state, and possibly shadowing an emergency room doctor,” he says. 

Wise’s son is in eighth grade and Wise says they’re already thinking about his son’s college essays.

“Even this coming week, I’ll be talking to a college counselor and that will be the main topic of discussion.” But Wise notes, instead of a more intensive class, geometry will be limited to just a couple hours a day, and more importantly, his son is happy.
 
“He wants to be a medical doctor, he wants to go to Brown University,” he says.
 
Jill Tipograph is the founder of Everything Summer, a high-end consulting company that  helps parents choose summer programs for their kids. The company’s tagline  is “From camp to college”. Tipograph says with college more competitive than ever, just doing well in school is no longer enough.
 
“What’s the other variable they have control over? The next time period is summer,” she says.
 
And parents get it. Jeff Shumlin, who runs Putney Student Travel, a service which takes kids abroad on anything from a community service trip to Costa Rica to a language immersion visit to Spain, says it’s not his program that’s behind the pressure.
 
“We have many parents who call and say in the most straightforward of terms, will this get my child into college?”
 
Putney’s website discourages students from using its trips, which cost thousands of dollars, as application enhancers. But the site also features a special college essay section including the names of the schools its graduates have been accepted to: Georgetown, Duke and Skidmore.
 
But, notes Alison Chisolm, an independent counselor with Anna Ivey college consulting, says parents who can’t afford these high priced experiences shouldn’t worry about it.
 
“There is no magic program and there is no magic credential that gets you into college. And the idea that there is one, is an illusion,” she says.
 
An illusion that keeps getting more expensive. According to the World Youth Student & Educational Travel Confederation, the average amount spent on a student trip abroad has doubled in the last decade -- to almost $4,000.

Correction: The originial article misidentified Jeff Shumlin. The text has been corrected.

Budweiser is coming out with a new can today. The can is in the shape of a bow-tie, which has been part of the Bud’s logo since 1956. It’s the same height as a regular beer can, it sounds like a regular beer can and the beer still takes like Bud. But good luck trying to crush it after you’re done.

One of the first things people notice about the can is how strong it is, says Pat McGauley, the vice president of innovation at Budweiser. He says to bring-in the the waistline of the can -- so that it looks like a bow tie -- they had to use stronger aluminum.

“So it would maintain its shape,” McGauley explains.

It takes the “shaping machine” 16 steps to give the new can its 10-degree angles. For beer drinkers worried that the little pinch on the can is going to cut back on your buzz, you only lose seven tenths of an ounce. Bud has been working on the can for several years.

“These aren’t small feats, we did spend significant dollars in our can plant and in our breweries and in the cost of the aluminum,” McGauley says.

So, the can is pretty cool, but what’s the point if the beer tastes the same?

“It drives a lot of excitement,” McGauley says, and buzz.

The bow-tie has been part of the Bud’s logo since 1956.

Bud could use both right now, says Eric Shepard, the executive editor at Beer Marketer’s Insights. “The Budweiser brand has been very week in the United States,” Shepard says.

It’s not just Bud. Sales of big beer makers like Miller and Coors have been slipping in recent years. The recession didn’t help and there’s another problem: The rising popularity of wine and spirits.

Shephard says big beer makers are loathe to change the taste of the beer, that’s really risky. “So what do you do? You change marketing and/or you change packaging,” he says.

In recent years, Coors introduced a can that turns blue when it’s cold. And Miller put out a “punch top can” that makes the beer easier to chug. The new can will probably give Bud a bump in sales, says Gary Hemphill with the Beverage Marketing Corporation.

“The question beyond that is, is it a lasting increase or will be a novelty item?" Hemphill asks.

This week we'll be talking about the near-future of tech -- not flying cars and terminators, but what's coming in the next decade. Today, we bring you a conversation about free speech online.

A year ago, George Washington Law Professor Jeffrey Rosen went to a hush-hush meeting at Stanford that dealt with censorship. It was full of academics, international government representatives, and a small group of young techies from companies like Twitter and Google.

Rosen joins Marketplace Tech's Ben Johnson to discuss the meeting, online speech, who controls it and what threatens it. Click on the audio player above to hear the full interview.

 

On Thursday, after my story on Black-owned franchises aired on Marketplace, a few listeners raised questions about a line in the story's introduction, which said the average white family has $632,000 in wealth, while the average black family has $98,000.

To some people, those numbers sounded high – especially at a time when so many families, regardless of race, are struggling.

I posed the question to the authors of the Urban Institute study who informed the intro.

Listener Ms. Mary was correct when she suggested we must be talking about "mean" or average – as opposed to "median" data.

Here is what the Urban Institute study authors said.

The primary data presented in our brief is means. In 2010, the average (or mean) wealth of white families was $632,000 and the average wealth of black families was $98,000. In this case, the racial wealth gap is 6-to-1 ($632,000/$98,000).

If we look at the "typical" (or median) family, the wealth numbers are substantially lower, but the racial wealth gap is larger. In 2010, the wealth of the typical white family was $123,800 and the wealth of typical black family was $15,700. In this case, the racial wealth gap is even larger at 8-to-1 ($123,800/$15,700).

Both mean and median measures of wealth are important. Mean wealth tells us how a group is prospering as a whole relative to other groups. Median wealth tells us how the "typical" person is doing (i.e., the person in the middle of the group). One complication with focusing on median wealth is that it doesn't show where all the remaining wealth goes (we only know the wealth of that one middle person).

I followed up by asking whether the wealthiest few Americans are affecting the data in any way.

The Urban Institute says that is the case.

What happens if we trim the extremes off our analysis, excluding the top and bottom 1%? For white families in the middle of this 98%, their average wealth is $434,000. If we take this down another notch and exclude the top and bottom 5%, white families in the middle of the remaining 90% have an average wealth of $297,000. If we do the same calculations for black families, their average wealth is $75,000 and $57,000, respectively. The resulting white-to-black wealth ratios are still in the 5/6: 1 range, on par with what we found when we included all families in the original research.

How many of you have browsed through the SkyMall magazine while taking a flight? The in-flight shopping catalog is the comedy relief of the air and heaven-forbid we go more than a few hours without buying anything. The products are just so bizarre.

Have you noticed the wearable cocoon that allegedly wards off bedbugs or the mouth piece that can cure hiccups? And then there's the kitty litter box shaped like a house plant.

That last product caught the eye of one of our listeners in New York, Lois Weiss. And she wrote to us about it on our Facebook page. What made her want the litter box?

"At the time we were looking to move to a new townhouse and the only place I could figure out to put the cat box was in the entryway of our house because it had a tiled floor and would make it easy to clean up. When I saw this cat box, I was just amazed because it would just work perfectly," says Weiss, who spent $150 on the product.

 

 

Julia Bensfield Luce is a pseudo-expert on all things SkyMall-related. She's the co-founder of the comedy blog SkyMall Product Review, which takes a humorous look at some of the items sold by SkyMall.

"The best part about SkyMall to me is the photos. I mean, the products in themselves are ridiculous," says Luce.

Bensfield's favorite SkyMall product is the StreetStrider -- a sort of elliptical machine that moves down the street. Cost? $2,099.

"A lot of the humor does come in from the astronomical prices on some of these items -- and some seem worth it. We're tempted once in a while to swing in and make a purchase," says Luce.

Have you bought anything from SkyMall? Leave a comment and let us know. Plus, be sure to take the quiz and test your knowledge on the products SkyMall really sells -- and the ones we made up!