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Marginal Revolution?
A project founded by Los Angeles-based actress and writer Tamara Krinsky advocates a simple change that anyone can believe in: By altering the printing margin preference for Microsoft Word documents from the standard 1.25 inches to 0.75 inch, Americans can save a whole lot of paper -- and trees, and money.
Plus you don't have to kill your dog.
Posted by Alex Tabarrok on February 17, 2008 at 11:55 AM in Economics | Permalink
Comments
No! This is a false savings. Wide margins make the text width smaller, which increases legibility. Compare nicely typeset books with slapped together business reports. Human attention is scarce, paper is cheap. If something is worth printing, it is worth printing with good margins. A better way to save paper is to not print documents that will not be read.
Posted by: Nathan Whitehead at Feb 17, 2008 12:23:05 PM
Fortunately, that only applies to Office 2003. Office 2007 released last year has one-inch margins all the way around as the default in Word. It's also a lot easier in Word 2007 to change the margins -- 0.75-inch left and right margins are one of the preset defaults that you can choose from.
Posted by: Daniel Stout at Feb 17, 2008 12:27:05 PM
Go further! Change your margins to .75", single-space, and use a a 9-point font. Set your word processor to 2-column mode. Then send everything to the printer double-sided.
This isn't only a matter of saving paper. A standard 1.25" margin with a 12-point font has too many characters per line to be efficiently readable. Increasing the margins to .75" makes readability even worse. I fear a backlash. But if you treat the design problem as a whole, you can get crisply readable lines while saving whole reams of paper.
Posted by: James Grimmelmann at Feb 17, 2008 12:27:13 PM
I agree about the readability thing: word's defaults are always far too wide, this will only make it worse. Set big margins and force yourself to say it in fewer words: that'll save both paper and your readers' time.
For printing other people's documents, I highly recommend FinePrint, which will trim each page's margins before printing two-up. Often this gets you two pages on one with very little reduction in text size.
(Unfortunately it's windows only. On the mac I crop PDFs in Preview, save, then print 2-up in Adobe Reader.)
Posted by: improbable at Feb 17, 2008 12:50:56 PM
As a college student facing minimum page lengths for papers, I wholeheartedly oppose this movement.
Posted by: Tommy at Feb 17, 2008 1:11:23 PM
I don't get it. Why grow all those trees if you're not going to make paper out of them?
Posted by: Michael Giesbrecht at Feb 17, 2008 1:15:11 PM
Paper costs very little (I bought 5000 sheets for < $20), so I'm not too concerned about saving a few cents here and there while making my writing less legible.
Posted by: Andy at Feb 17, 2008 1:36:03 PM
Now I'm wondering whether it's possible that in the not-too-far-off future, companies will be able to justify employees'
being found guilty of theft based on the width of the margins they use (last week's discussion of theft comes to mind, and
judging from the piles of printouts thrown out each week at my company's printer sites - given that people think they're
important to print at one instant, but then the impulse is likely subordinated to other immediate priorities - there's much
evidence of waste, that along with margin negligence could be construed as theft).
Posted by: TomG at Feb 17, 2008 1:41:51 PM
Not only does the cost of my inconvenience reading with such narrow margins dwarf the 'paper-cost savings' pointed to (which is itself minuscule), it's simply sloppy economics to argue that using less paper will 'save trees.' The trees that will be 'saved' are not the ones anyone cares about 'saving'--ancient redwoods, etc. They are trees grown specifically for the purpose of harvesting wood for paper. The demand for these trees is positively related to the demand for the paper they're used to produce. Less demand for paper, fewer such trees and no saved redwoods.
Posted by: Papernomics at Feb 17, 2008 1:48:17 PM
Why would anyone ever use Microsoft Word for anything when there's LaTeX (http://www.latex-project.org/)?
Posted by: varnson at Feb 17, 2008 1:56:20 PM
People, can't we all just use TeX?
Posted by: jonm at Feb 17, 2008 2:18:19 PM
varson,
I love using LaTeX too, but "hacking the document" can easily take more time than its worth considering how much time a lot of things take using a word processor. So making Word work better has value.
If only OpenOffice didn't so completely and utterly suck...
Posted by: agm at Feb 17, 2008 2:43:27 PM
But what about leaving margin space for hole punching?
Even if you yourself don't intend to punch holes in your document, someone down the road may end up with a copy of it and want to put it in a binder. Reduced margins would make that impossible.
Posted by: Julia G at Feb 17, 2008 2:59:42 PM
I took the post to be an excuse for Alex to make a bad pun--I don't think smaller margins would make much of an economic or environmental dent one way or the other.
Posted by: Michael at Feb 17, 2008 3:34:14 PM
Printing in 9-point type? Damn you and your twenty-something eyes.
Things change when you hit your forties.
Posted by: bartman at Feb 17, 2008 3:42:37 PM
Why are we printing at all?
Posted by: Andrew at Feb 17, 2008 3:58:37 PM
what bartman said
Posted by: tom s. at Feb 17, 2008 4:26:21 PM
If your default printer will handle it, set your default to two-sided printing. This not only saves paper, it's a lot easier to carry around.
You may have to use PowerPoint to actually present, but don't send out PowerPoint decks. (1) they waste paper, and (2) are often uncomprehensible to any reader who wasn't previously at the presentation.
I've taken to doing a word document with inserted graphs for business presentations. (1) it's different, so people pay attention (2) my work is in complete sentences, so it can be understood by others (3) it forces me to think in complete sentences, unlike the mental sloppiness of bullet points.
Posted by: ZBicyclist at Feb 17, 2008 6:07:40 PM
But what about leaving margin space for hole punching?
Or readers who might want to hand-write comments in the margins.
Posted by: Peter at Feb 17, 2008 6:44:13 PM
This theme is familiar, and I applaud Krinsky for her effort. The idea, after all, is to change the *default* so that people who do not care (unlike those here) use less paper. For those who (seriously or not) consider paper "cheap", remember that weak property rights (e.g., Indonesia and Brazil) often underlie "cheap" paper. Remember your externalities.
For a related idea, how about printing dissertations and theses in SINGLE SPACE? As completed documents, they should be, but (path dependency again) universities are stuck in the age of typewriter standards. I have lobbied my campus administration over the past two years and "studying the idea" is all I get. (The problem, btw, is not the standards of dissertation publishers...) More on that idea...
Posted by: David Zetland at Feb 17, 2008 7:05:52 PM
This is a non-solution to a non-problem. No one is cutting down irreplacable old-growth forests to make paper. Paper is made using large plantations of fast-growing trees planted expressly for that purpose. It is a cash crop, like wheat or bananas, and you needn't feel bad about using any ammount it any more than you would about consuming those foodstuffs. The cost of producing it is fully internalized, so if you are able willing to pay the extra $0.01 for a more readable hard copy, go for it and don't take any crap from people who want you to feel bad about it. (And if you really are too poor or stingy to cough up the extra $0.01, perhaps you might consider doing without a hard copy.)
Posted by: David Wright at Feb 17, 2008 7:06:55 PM
I don't know how fast we're cutting trees down, but I'm pretty sure they take a relatively long time to grow back. If we're cutting them down slow enough that the tree farms can replace them without needing it from other sources--which I hope is the case--then that's good. If not, then researching methods of saving paper probably wouldn't hurt.
I'm not sure about the validity of the claim that changing the margins of a paper will help, but I believe it might not hurt too badly to give it a try. I mean, since paper's really that cheap, then if changing the margin helps, then it helps, and if it hurts, it's not too big of a loss and people go back to the regular method. Unfortunately, attempting to change human beings is like trying to herd cats, and actually attempting to test the theory on a large scale would most definately be more work than it's worth--barring an emergency paper shortage or something like that. Of course, I could be wrong.
I'm going to print a hard copy of this comment now, which will be read once and then disregarded forever.
Posted by: Anon at Feb 17, 2008 8:07:55 PM
Next, I propose saving wheat by eating less bread..
An idea just as silly..
less paper used = less demand for paper = less trees in the world (not more)
Posted by: geoffrey at Feb 17, 2008 8:55:50 PM
On the dogs reference, I am appalled that anyone would argue that dogs are comparable to SUVs in their marginal impact on the environment. I am not sure how one could determine what is marginal, but just looking at the total energy use of dogs (roughly 1/10 of a horsepower) and that of SUVs (at least 20 horsepower when cruising--peak power is rated well above 200 horsepower) makes it very hard to argue that they would be comparable at some marginal level. Economists (I am one) need to be a little less arrogant and pay more attention to reality.
Posted by: Frank Howland at Feb 17, 2008 10:01:03 PM
David Zetland:
My doctoral thesis was submitted elecronically - I have yet to print a full-length copy. Most of the reviewing was done electronically too. Where I went to school, this is now the default way of submitting.
Posted by: bartman at Feb 18, 2008 12:32:58 AM
