Marginal Revolution

John Sutherland and 900 Victorian novelists

The appearance, after more than twenty years, of a second edition of John Sutherland’s The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction, is exciting news for Victorian enthusiasts, whether students, academics or readers. For the book represents a staggering achievement that is unlikely ever to be equalled. That a single scholar, working un-assisted, should undertake to synopsize 554 (now 560) novels and offer biographical accounts of 878 (now 900) novelists, as well as compiling entries on forty-seven magazines and periodicals, twenty-six major illustrators and thirty-eight (now forty-one) miscellaneous items (“Sandism”, “the Yellowback”, “The Nautical Novel”), is a feat that beggars imagination, especially since much of the work was completed before the availability of the internet and searchable digitized texts. In his Preface to the first edition Sutherland stated that it took him five years to prepare the Companion. In his Preface to the new edition he confesses that it was “the work of a decade”.

Here is more and I thank The Browser for the pointer.

The culture that is French

Journalists accompanying Mr. Chatel and Hervé Novelli, the secretary of state for commerce, on a trip to an Intermarché supermarket in Villeneuve-le-Roi, southeast of Paris, became suspicious when the aisles were suddenly filled with well-dressed, articulate women eager to praise a government freeze on the price of some school supplies before the new school year began.

Here is the article.  Here is information on French subsidies for school supplies.  The women, in fact, were paid to be there.

Assorted links

1. The lost decade, from Michael Mandel.

2. Scott Sumner reviews Create Your Own Economy.

3. Distinctly rare and unique lobsters, recommended.

The evolution of sports rules

Gibbous, a loyal guy, asks:

The evolution of the rules of sports as a standards-setting process - - are the rules of basketball (or baseball, golf, football...) optimal in the same way that (arguably, at least) the QWERTY keyboard is?

I would put QWERTY aside, as that is a non-proprietary standard.  With a proprietary standard, I see a few reasons why the evolution of sports rules may be less than ideal. 

1. The rules may be geared toward the sale of merchandise, which implies an appeal to the young and to the least common denominator.  This is mostly an aesthetic objection, although you can tell a story about the purist being a neglected infra-marginal consumer.

2. The rules of the sport may be geared toward television advertising revenue, with the above argument repeated.

3. The league has market power and at some margin it will produce too few franchises; think of the league as selling franchise rights for money.  Some of this output restriction is quality control but some of it sheer monopolization.  (Allowing more franchises, at some margin, will loosen the meaning of the rules and conventions.  Imagine if way back when they had let NBA teams play the Harlem Globetrotters every now and then.  In what year would the fifth-best NBA team start beating them?)

4. If the league restricts the number of teams, other distortions will result, such as when the city of Memphis overbids for the right to have an NBA team.  Furthermore franchises will end up too far apart in geographic terms; bids are determined by producer surplus but societal welfare depends on consumer surplus too.

5. Sports leagues lead to less than optimal levels of player mobility; think monopsony power and the desire to redistribute rents to team owners.  Remember Curt Flood?

6. It is a good industrial organization question whether sports leagues will produce too many or too few games in a season, relative to a social optimum.  Figure it out!  I have an answer in mind but I'm not letting on about it.

China-Africa fact of the day

Based on official statistics, since 2003, the number of Africans in Guangzhou has been growing at 30-40% annually. Based on a report in the Guangzhou Daily, there might already be 100,000 in the community. They come from Nigeria, Guinea, Cameroon, Liberia, and Mali. Amongst these, Africa’s most populous country Nigeria claims first place.

They primarily live in village-districts in the city of Guangdong (like Dongpu, Dengfeng Jie, Yongping Jie). They do their business in a few large-scale China-Africa commerce malls.

Here is more information and I thank David Shor for the pointer.