Marginal Revolution

Tuna fish query

Shaun, a loyal MR reader, asks:

I have something that is bugging me: I have noticed that the small tuna fish cans are cheaper, by the ounce, than the larger ones. This holds true with every brand and supermarket. This seems very counterintuitive to me; nearly every other food product gets cheaper as the quantity increases. I wondered if you could tell me what's going on here.

Could it be storage and spoilage costs, thereby making this the corollary of the vending machine question?  Or is it price discrimination against families and in favor of single people?  Or do single people never finish the can and thus they need a lower price as compensation, noting that you still have to cite storage costs to prevent arbitrage?  Those are my quick reactions, can you do better?

Franco Purini on Tokyo

The minute and the colossal follow one another and clash in a powerful energetic flow that knows no rest, while tangled strips of infrastructure wind between buildings in spectacular spatial combinations.  All is bathed in a hazy, dim light, which rarely brightens, and permeates every interstice of the city, from window to window, sign to sign and corner to corner.  At night, artificial lighting transforms Tokyo into a fantastical apparition of artificial mountain ranges that glow like braziers.  The visual trauma is due to Tokyo giving no sense of any recognizable structure.  Compare with Europe, or the West in general, where cities still have a perceptive -- albeit residual and fragmentary -- urban form which is always based on a more or less rational order, in Tokyo you find a randomness in which every urban rule is overturned or negated.  Or at least so it seems.  As a matter of face, once initial impressions have been overcome, you begin to notice the presence of recurring threads in the urban fabric, first on a subliminal level, than more consciously; a fabric made of multiple, fractal agglomerates of settlements.  These agglomerates are groups in self-similar masses, suggesting urban spaces which are not defined by clearly scaled hierarchies or distinct morphological types.  Here, urban spatiality seems to feature the unplanned coexistence of architectural units and the incidental contiguity or what is small and large, simple immaterial -- rhythm beats over everything, constituting an amazing unifying element in its almost hypnotic repetition of the same model.  In this sense you discover that in the end Tokyo is a simple city that is different from European and American cities only because urban planning is practically absent.  If the former are cities of space, governed by the laws of perspective, then Tokyo is a city of situations...in Asia's greatest city you are completely disoriented from the start. 

That is in a good book called Tokyo: City and Architecture.  I am struck by how much the Tokyo Metro and underground corridors are in fact the defining parts of the city and the most memorable destinations.

Assorted links

1. Own-to-rent: not a good idea

2. More scoop on Romergate

3. The Transparent Society, ten years later

4. Blogging as therapy

5. Why might academics be less happy?

Print Your Own

Need Money?  Print your own here.

Hat tip to Kottke.

Why Popcorn Costs So Much at The Movies

That's the title of the new microeconomics book by Richard McKenzie.  Here is a book trailer on YouTube.  The subtitle is: "And Other Pricing Puzzles."

I am a fan of this book and I wrote a blurb for it.  It is popular economics but it is more extended microeconomic reasoning than most of the other popular economics books.

Donald C, Lavoie, intellectual father of the econoblogosphere

Don Lavoie taught at GMU many years before he passed away in 2001.  Most of Don's work was in comparative systems and central planning, but in the early to mid 90s he spent a few years investigating hypertext.  Don claimed that someday economics would be written in linkable, annotatable form, rather than on paper.  Economics, in his Gadamer-drenched view, would become one big giant conversation rather than a series of isolated papers.  Here is one snippet of his views.  For a few years he talking about the idea non-stop.

At the time I thought he was crazy.

The glasses-cleaning machine

The problem with cleaning your glasses is that the drying action can create new smudge.  So the Japanese have invented a machine to address this problem.  The contraption has two pools of whirring water, at different temperatures.  First you dip your glasses into the vibrating pool of warmer water, where some kind of steam action takes place as well.  Afterwards you dip your glasses into the cooler pool of water, which finishes the action and removes the effect of the steam.

I've never ever had my glasses so clean before.  I found the glasses-cleaning machine, not surprisingly, in one of the underground passageways near Shinjuku.

How to find new books to read

TLV, a loyal MR reader, asks:

I've always been curious about how Tyler goes about choosing new books to read. Most people rely on recommendations from others, but Tyler seems like someone who generates a lot of recommendations rather than relying on them. What is your process?

Children, do not try this at home, but here goes: visit Borders every Tuesday to look for new books, go to a local public library every other day and scan the new books section, subscribe to TLS, London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, noting that you should spend more time with the ads than the book reviews, read the blogs Bookslut and Literary Saloon, read the new magazine BookMark (recommended), read the NYT, FT, and Guardian and their books sections, review lots of books on your blog and peruse the numerous review copies you get in the mail (thanks, you mailers and yes I do look at each and every one; keep them coming!). 

It's rare that I rely on recommendations from other people.

Oh, yes, you should get free shipping on Amazon.com.

Price controls by any other name

Mom-and-pop service stations are running into a problem as gasoline marches toward $4 a gallon: Thousands of old-fashioned pumps can't register more than $3.99 on their spinning mechanical dials.

The pumps, throwbacks to a bygone era on the American road, are difficult and expensive to upgrade, and replacing them is often out of the question for station owners who are still just scraping by.

Many of the same pumps can only count up to $99.99 for the total sale, preventing owners of some SUVs, vans, trucks and tractor-trailers to fill their tanks all the way.

As many as 8,500 of the nation's 170,000 service stations have old-style meters that need to be fixed — about 17,000 individual pumps, said Bob Renkes, executive vice president of the Petroleum Equipment Institute of Tulsa, Okla.

Here is the full story, thanks to William Griffiths for the pointer.

Taken to the Cleaners, Again

A tariff on imports of coat hangers from China is raising dry cleaning costs.  The Aplia Econ blog runs the numbers:

Advocates of trade restrictions often argue that protection will save jobs. Since we can observe price and cost increases associated with trade restrictions, we can estimate how much it costs to save each job in a protected industry. According to the NPR story, there are roughly 30,000 dry cleaners in the U.S., and on average, each pays an additional $4,000 per year due to the hanger tariff. This indicates an average annual cost of 30,000 firms x $4,000 per firm = $120 million. According to the U.S. International Trade Commission's report, U.S. employment in wire hanger manufacturing was 564 workers in 2004 and fell to 236 workers by 2006. Let's assume that employment in this sector would have fallen to zero in the absence of the tariff, and that with the tariff, employment will recover to 2004 levels. In other words, assume the tariff "saves" 564 jobs. Dividing the cost of the tariff to U.S. dry cleaners ($120 million year) by the number of jobs saved (564 jobs) indicates that each job saved costs about $212,765 per year. Keep in mind that the typical full-time worker in this sector earns about $30,000 per year. Even if we assume that industry employment doubles, the cost of the tariff is still roughly $120,000 per job.