Tag: #FOWC

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W is for Wedgwood

Wedgwood “Jasperware.” Photo from House Beautiful.

There is something in me that loves a good chart. I can’t help it. Some people are stopped short by a pair of soulful eyes or a kitten sleeping, but give me a good table of figures, and I am hooked.

Josiah Wedgwood, manufacturer of pottery to English royalty, must have felt the same way because he was a pioneer in cost accounting. Not only that, but he designed beautiful dishes.

Wedgwood cost breakdown. Neil McKendrick, Josiah Wedgwood and Cost Accounting in the Industrial Revolution, 1970.

Bad Knee, Big Brain

Wedgwood was born in 1730, the 11th child of a potter who transformed his father’s small, midland English artisan studio into a manufacturing empire. He survived smallpox, though it left him with a knee too weak to run a potter’s wheel. As a result, he concentrated on design and gravitated towards glazes. He stumbled on to the latest science–chemistry–and that allowed him to transform the cheap, black bowls of the family shop into multi-colored, sophisticated figurines and dinnerware for aristocrats. He married someone who had money and found business partners with connections into high society. It paid off.

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V is for Value

What’s it worth to you?

What’s the value of a stock? A toy? A flower? A work of art?

“Beeple” Winklemann, “Everydays–The First 5000 Days.” $69 million.

There are financial valuation models that explain how to set prices for goods in the “market” and for stocks on the exchange. But every time something sells for surprising sums of money, like $69 million for an NFT artwork, we should be reminded about how prices really work.

Value is always in the eyes of the buyer.

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T is for Taxes

1. True or False: Some parts of the world tax cow flatulence.

Nobody likes to pay taxes. Everybody hates tax collectors. In ancient Sumeria (as I noted in letter “C”), they had to press the taxes inside clay balls because they were “tampered” with, presumably by the tax collectors. Nowadays, the tax collectors–the IRS–has safeguards on top of security measures surrounding robust defenses against tampering. That’s a good thing for us. You might want to be more sympathetic towards the IRS. They’re safeguarding our money.

It’s True, cows are taxed extra in EU countries like Denmark and Ireland because their “expulsion” of methane gases are a significant contributor (some 18%) of greenhouses gases. Strange tax practices in history are a fascinating topic I covered before, in Tax the Peasants with this One Weird Trick!

Today, I’ll share a few fun facts about taxes in my annual post reminding you that the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program might be able to do your taxes for you, for free.

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