Marginal Revolution

*Wilco*, by Wilco

If you aggregating a lot of binary opinions, I vote yes you should buy it.  It's more accessible and less mysterious-sounding than their usual fare, which you may consider either a plus or a minus.  If you're wondering what my underlying stance is, a few days ago I said to Brian Hooks something like: "I'm glad I've never really been a fan, that leaves me free to enjoy them without feeling threatened by what they stand for."

Status games among the Amish

Some Amish bishops in Indiana weakened restrictions on the use of telephones. Fax machines became commonplace in Amish-owned businesses. Web sites marketing Amish furniture began to crop up. Although the sites were run by non-Amish third parties, they nevertheless intensified a feeling of competition, says Casper Hochstetler, a 70-year-old Amish bishop who lives in Shipshewana.

"People wanted bigger weddings, newer carriages," Mr. Lehman says. "They were buying things they didn't need." Mr. Lehman spent several hundred dollars on a model-train and truck hobby, and about $4,000 on annual family vacations, he says. This year, there will be no vacation.

It became common practice for families to leave their carriages home and take taxis on shopping trips and to dinners out.

Some Amish families had bought second homes on the west coast of Florida and expensive Dutch Harness Horses, with their distinctive, prancing gait. Others lined their carriages in dark velvet and illuminated them with battery-powered LED lighting.

Most of the article concerns a recent bank run in an Amish community:

Only Amish people can join. The trust's 2,100 depositors receive annual interest of 3.2%, while borrowers pay 3.5% interest on loans. There are no credit checks. Monthly mortgage payments can be no more than 33% of a borrower's gross income.

The trust's structure reflects the Amish philosophy of sharing. It isn't insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., but by its own bylaws it maintains at least $1 million in cash reserves. The trust has never exercised its authority to foreclose on a home.

A sustained run wiped out the bank's reserves and now it has ceased lending.  Probably it is hard to gather the data, but I would love to read a book Economic Life Among the Amish.

Update on the public plan

Ruth Marcus tells Democrats not to go to the wall for it.  She is not personally against the presence of a public plan, she just doesn't think it is a "do or die" question.  There are other ways of making the sector more competitive, if need be.

Here is the veteran commentator Wisewon on the public plan.

As Ezra Klein indicates, the health insurance exchanges are a more important part health care reform.  Here is a progressive symposium on the public plan; read Paul Starr.

Brad DeLong writes:

We should set up a public plan, let it compete with the privates, and see if it can provide care people like more cheaply than the private insurance companies. Friedrich Hayek would approve: the idea is to use the market as an institutional discovery mechanism.

Is this the SOE model?  I'm still stuck on what the public plan will be instructed to maximize, much less what it will end up maximizing after ?? years of Congressional interference.  And exactly who in our government will mimic the behavior of shareholders?

Assorted links

1. Boston Globe story about Peter Leeson.

2. Seth Godin weighs in on Gladwell vs. Anderson.

3. Tractor Square Dance.

4. The macroeconomics of Australia, with a poke at Kiwis at the end.

5. Free Saudi wedding for quitting smoking.

How to fight corruption in Nepal

The Nepalese government plans to issue pants to airport workers that have no pockets.

A spokesman said trousers without pockets would help the authorities “curb the irregularities”.

The move comes after the prime minister of Nepal said corruption was damaging the airport’s reputation, AFP reported.

Apparently without pockets it is harder to take bribes.  (You also can file this under "Carrying costs > liquidity premium.")  The pointer is from Air Genius Gary Leff, who I might add is allowed to wear pockets.

Ben Casnocha reviews *Create Your Own Economy*

I am delighted with the review, which is more like a review essay, with many interesting observations on internet culture as well as on the book.  The essay title is "RSSted Development."  Excerpt:

...the intellectual and emotional stimulation we experience by assembling a custom stream of bits. Cowen refers to this process as the “daily self-assembly of synthetic experiences.” My inputs appear a chaotic jumble of scattered information but to me they touch all my interest points. When I consume them as a blend, I see all-important connections between the different intellectual narratives I follow a business idea (entrepreneurship) in the airplane space (travel), for example. Because building the blend is a social exercise real communities and friendships form around certain topics my social life and intellectual life intersect more intensely than before. And I engage in ongoing self-discovery by reflecting upon my interests, finding new bits to add to my stream, and thinking about how it all fits together.

Cowen maintains that these benefits enhance your internal mental existence; how you order information in your head and how you use this information to conceive of your identity and life aspirations affects your internal well-being. Because a personal blend reflects a diverse set of media (think hyper-specific niche news outlets in lieu of a nightly news broadcast that everyone watches on one of three networks), and because each person constructs their own stories to link their inputs together, the benefits are unique to the individual. They are also invisible. It is impossible to see what stories someone is crafting internally to make sense of their stream; it is impossible to appreciate the personal coherence of it.

The way the benefits of info consumption habits accrue privately but are perceived publicly approximates romance, Cowen adds. Compare a long-distance relationship to a proximate one. In a long-distance relationship, you have infrequent but very high peaks when you see each other. Friends see you run off for fancy getaway weekends when the sweetheart comes to town. Yet day-to-day it is not very satisfying. In a marriage by contrast you have frequent, bite-size, mundane interactions which rarely hit peaks or valleys of intensity. The happiness research that asserts married couples are happier than non-married ones and especially happier than couples dating long-distance is not always self-evident. Outsiders see the inevitable frustrations and flare-ups that mark even stable marriages. What they cannot see is the interior satisfaction that the couple derives by weaving together these mundane moments into a relationship rich in meaning and depth, and in writing a shared life narrative that is all their own.

After reading the essay, I wonder how many blogs Ben has in his RSS feed...

Markets in everything, vending machines edition

John de Palma has much to offer today:

An entrepreneur who used his redundancy money to start a business selling foldable shoes from a vending machine is to launch in America.  Matt Horan's £5 Rollasole is an emergency flat shoe women can change into from their stiletto heels for the walk home after a night out.  The pumps are already on sale in Ibiza superclubs Eden and Space(...)

Link here.  No, innovation is not dead:

...Katie Shea, a senior at the Stern School of Business at New York University, is instead pursuing her dreams of entrepreneurship. She has founded a shoe company that designs and imports collapsible shoes that women can wear while walking to work and then stuff into their pocketbooks..."

But where is the vending machine?  Scrub that one.  I want something different from my vending machines:

...Over the last decade, Mr. Torghele, 56, an entrepreneur in this northern Italian city who first made money selling pasta in California, has developed a vending machine that cooks pizza. The machine does not just slip a frozen pizza into a microwave. It actually whips up flour, water, tomato sauce and fresh ingredients to produce a piping hot pizza in about three minutes...

Here are previous MR posts on vending machines.  Here is my favorite.