Wine and Economics

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

The following observations from Freakonomics following on a story about a particularly brazen case of mid-level wine fraud in a British supermarket:

This last phenomenon [little incentive for any individual to sue for fraud over small amounts] is the same sort of collective action dilemma that mobile phone companies, credit-card companies, and the like have been trading on for years: they upcharge customers a few cents here and there—rounding the length of a dropped call up to the nearest minute, for instance, or playing with the spread on exchange rates on foreign transactions—but it’s below the radar screen of anyone but the most obsessively litigious or penny-pinching customer. It adds up to a lot of money for the company, but not enough is taken from any individual to incite a lawsuit. It’s thus a highly effective form of fraud . . .

It might seem, then, that the optimal opportunity for fraud is where (1) the damages to each individual are relatively low; (2) the number of instances is fewer than would make the case worth a plaintiff firm’s time; and yet (3) the business is large enough to make good money for the counterfeiter.

And while we’re approaching the subject of economics through wine, here’s another item from Freakonomics:

In American restaurants, I have always seen a glass of wine (perhaps 6 to 7.5 ounces) sold for at least 1/3 of the price of a bottle of wine (750 milliliters=29.6 ounces), so that the per-unit price of a glass is typically at least 1/3 more than a bottle.  In the U.S., it’s always cheaper to buy a bottle of wine than buy glasses if you are having 3 glasses or more.  In the Parisian restaurant we visited, the per-ounce price was the same whether you bought a glass (150 milliliters) or a bottle (750 milliliters).  Indeed, even a carafe (pichet) of 500 milliters was sold at the same per-unit price.  Why did the restaurant do this, given the costs of fetching the bottle each time and pouring glasses (as opposed to uncorking once and leaving the bottle on the table)?  Also, given the mark-up on wines at restaurants, the owner should have an incentive to get customers to buy more wine—to buy a full bottle.  I don’t understand what seems to be a pricing anomaly.

Two take-aways there:  First, if you’re going to have more than three glasses, just buy the bottle.  Secondly, is it possible that something other than the profit motive might have been in play and are we so conditioned to its ubiquitous operation in our society that we are truly befuddled when it appears to be supplanted by other motivations?

Marilynne Robinson on The Daily Show, Mark Twain on Interviews

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 3 Comments

Marilynne Robinson is one of those authors whose name I keep running into and each time I do I make one of those mental notes that never quite materializes to read one of her books.  Mostly I’m interested in reading her Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Gilead: A Novel, and her most recent work, Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self.  The latter collects Robinson’s Dwight H. Terry Lectures at Yale University on the topic of religion, science, and consciousness.  No lack of ambition there.

Robinson recently appeared on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show.  Typical Stewart, a little bit serious, a little bit funny.  You can watch the five minute clip here.

Update:  Let me take an opportunity to embellish this post a little bit with another item I just came across.  Let’s begin by recognizing that this is not the most enthralling interview.  Robinson was not exactly inspiring and Stewart’s fan base, which seems for the most part to be a bit hostile to religion, is apoplectic (see the comments below the video clip).  There are probably a number of reasons why this interview doesn’t quite soar when on paper it probably looked like a good idea, but would anyone consider that the format itself is to blame?  In other words, are interviews inherently flawed?

The Mark Twain Foundation has just released for the first time in print a 10-page hand written essay on the subject of interviews written by Twain in 1889 or 1890.  You can see the whole essay at the Newhour’s web site including scans of the handwritten pages.  Here is an excerpt (sections of which brilliantly match form to content) that expresses Twain’s dissatisfaction with the interview:

The Interview was not a happy invention. It is perhaps the poorest of all ways of getting at what is in a man. In the first place, the interviewer is the reverse of an inspiration, because you are afraid of him. You know by experience that there is no choice between these disasters. No matter which he puts in, you will see at a glance that it would have been better if he had put in the other: not that the other would have been better than this, but merely that it wouldn’t have been this; and any change must be, and would be, an improvement, though in reality you know very well it wouldn’t. I may not make myself clear: if that is so, then I have made myself clear–a thing which could not be done except by not making myself clear, since what I am trying to show is what you feel at such a time, not what you think–for you don’t think; it is not an intellectual operation; it is only a going around in a confused circle with your head off. You only wish in a dumb way that you hadn’t done it, though really you don’t know which it is you wish you hadn’t done, and moreover you don’t care: that is not the point; you simply wish you hadn’t done it, whichever it is; done what, is a matter of minor importance and hasn’t anything to do with the case. You get at what I mean? You have felt that way? Well, that is the way one feels over his interview in print.

Yes, you are afraid of the interviewer, and that is not an inspiration. You close your shell; you put yourself on your guard; you try to be colorless; you try to be crafty, and talk all around a matter without saying anything: and when you see it in print, it makes you sick to see how well you succeeded. All the time, at every new change of question, you are alert to detect what it is the interviewer is driving at now, and circumvent him. Especially if you catch him trying to trick you into saying humorous things. And in truth that is what he is always trying to do. He shows it so plainly, works for it so openly and shamelessly, that his very first effort closes up that reservoir, and his next one caulks it tight. I do not suppose that a really humorous thing was ever said to an interviewer since the invention of his uncanny trade. Yet he must have something “characteristic;” so he invents the humorisms himself, and interlards them when he writes up his interview. They are always extravagant, often too wordy, and generally framed in “dialect”–a non-existent and impossible dialect at that. This treatment has destroyed many a humorist. But that is no merit in the interviewer, because he didn’t intend to do it.

There are plenty of reasons why the Interview is a mistake. One is, that the interviewer never seems to reflect that the wise thing to do, after he has turned on this and that and the other tap, by a multitude of questions, till he has found one that flows freely and with interest, would be to confine himself to that one, and make the best of it, and throw away the emptyings he had secured before. He doesn’t think of that. He is sure to shut off that stream with a question about some other matter; and straightway his one poor little chance of getting something worth the trouble of carrying home is gone, and gone for good. It would have been better to stick to the thing his man was interested in talking about, but you would never be able to make him understand that. He doesn’t know when you are delivering metal from when you are shoveling out slag, he can’t tell dirt from ducats; it’s all one to him, he puts in everything you say; then he sees, himself, that it is but green stuff and wasn’t worth saying, so he tries to mend it by putting in something of his own which he thinks is ripe, but in fact is rotten. True, he means well, but so does the cyclone.

Studying Optional

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 3 Comments

From Keith O’Brien’s “What happened to studying?” in The Boston Globe:

According to time-use surveys analyzed by professors Philip Babcock, at the University of California Santa Barbara, and Mindy Marks, at the University of California Riverside, the average student at a four-year college in 1961 studied about 24 hours a week. Today’s average student hits the books for just 14 hours.

This probably didn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone, the question is, Why?  The suggested answer is perhaps more troubling than the data.

The easy culprits — the allure of the Internet (Facebook!), the advent of new technologies (dude, what’s a card catalog?), and the changing demographics of college campuses — don’t appear to be driving the change, Babcock and Marks found. What might be causing it, they suggest, is the growing power of students and professors’ unwillingness to challenge them.

And …

One theory, offered by Babcock and Marks, suggests that the cause, or at least one of them, is a breakdown in the professor-student relationship. Instead of a dynamic where a professor sets standards and students try to meet them, the more common scenario these days, they suggest, is one in which both sides hope to do as little as possible.

“No one really has an incentive to make a demanding class,” Marks said. “To make a tough assignment, you have to write it, grade it. Kids come into office hours and want help on it. If you make it too hard, they complain. Other than the sheer love for knowledge and the desire to pass it on to the next generation, there is no incentive in the system to encourage effort.”

The problem dates back to the 1960s, said Murray Sperber, a visiting professor in the graduate school of education at the University of California Berkeley. Sperber, at the time, was a graduate student at Berkeley and was part of an upstart movement pushing for students to rate their professors. The idea, Sperber said, was to give students a chance to express their opinions about their classes — a noble thought, but one that has backfired, according to many professors. Course evaluations have created a sort of “nonaggression pact,” Sperber said, where professors — especially ones seeking tenure — go easy on the homework and students, in turn, give glowing course evaluations.

If there is a bright spot in the story it might be this:  At least students are self-aware of the problem.

In a 2008 survey of more than 160,000 undergraduates enrolled in the University of California system, students were asked to list what interferes most with their academic success. Some blamed family responsibilities, some blamed jobs. The second most common obstacle to success, according to the students, was that they were depressed, stressed, or upset. And then came the number one reason, agreed upon by 33 percent of students, who said they struggled with one particular problem “frequently” or “all the time”: They simply did not know how to sit down and study.

This also suggests that the problem cannot be blamed entirely on the breakdown of the teacher-student relationship cited above, although I suspect that bears a good bit of the responsibility.

Jack Kerouac (possibly drunk)

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

That is how The New Republic titled one of the many fascinating archival video clips it has assembled on its website.  When you watch that particular clip you realize that inserting “possibly” into the parenthetical statement was an act of inspired generosity.

Along with the Kerouac clip you will find videos of J. R. R. Tolkien, Isaiah Berlin, Sigmund Freud, Georges Bataille, Leon Trotsky, Aldous Huxley, Michel Foucault, Jean Paul Sartre, Walker Percy, Eudora Welty, Samuel Beckett, George Bernard Shaw, and several more.  Most of the clips are quite short, many are a bit grainy, and a few are not in English (such as Camus at a soccer match).

Just in case you needed something to help you waste away some time.  Although it’s not quite a waste, I don’t think.

Parenting and Its Discontents

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 2 Comments

In an engaging, if also sobering essay “All Joy and No Fun,” which appeared in New York Magazine, Jennifer Senior lays out the statistically grim outlook for parents:

From the perspective of the species, it’s perfectly unmysterious why people have children. From the perspective of the individual, however, it’s more of a mystery than one might think. Most people assume that having children will make them happier. Yet a wide variety of academic research shows that parents are not happier than their childless peers, and in many cases are less so. This finding is surprisingly consistent, showing up across a range of disciplines. Perhaps the most oft-cited datum comes from a 2004 study by Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize–winning behavioral economist, who surveyed 909 working Texas women and found that child care ranked sixteenth in pleasurability out of nineteen activities. (Among the endeavors they preferred: preparing food, watching TV, exercising, talking on the phone, napping, shopping, housework.) This result also shows up regularly in relationship research, with children invariably reducing marital satisfaction …. As a rule, most studies show that mothers are less happy than fathers, that single parents are less happy still, that babies and toddlers are the hardest, and that each successive child produces diminishing returns. But some of the studies are grimmer than others. Robin Simon, a sociologist at Wake Forest University, says parents are more depressed than nonparents no matter what their circumstances—whether they’re single or married, whether they have one child or four.

These are hard words to read for someone who hopes one day to have children and partake of the joys and travails that accompany them.  And yet, she goes on to write, these findings “violate a parent’s deepest intuition.”  So she wonders, “Why is this finding duplicated over and over again despite the fact that most parents believe it to be wrong?”  Senior explores a number of possible factors beginning with the changing socio-economic value of children:

Before urbanization, children were viewed as economic assets to their parents. If you had a farm, they toiled alongside you to maintain its upkeep; if you had a family business, the kids helped mind the store. But all of this dramatically changed with the moral and technological revolutions of modernity. As we gained in prosperity, childhood came increasingly to be viewed as a protected, privileged time, and once college degrees became essential to getting ahead, children became not only a great expense but subjects to be sculpted, stimulated, instructed, groomed. (The Princeton sociologist Viviana Zelizer describes this transformation of a child’s value in five ruthless words: “Economically worthless but emotionally priceless.”) Kids, in short, went from being our staffs to being our bosses.

Moreover, she notes the tendency of “middle- and upper-income families” to “see their children as projects to be perfected.”

Annette Lareau, the sociologist who coined the term “concerted cultivation” to describe the aggressive nurturing of economically advantaged children, puts it this way: “Middle-class parents spend much more time talking to children, answering questions with questions, and treating each child’s thought as a special contribution. And this is very tiring work.” Yet it’s work few parents feel that they can in good conscience neglect, says Lareau, “lest they put their children at risk by not giving them every advantage.”

Even more troubling in an age in which couples delay having children until later in life, some psychologists believe putting off childbearing may be one of the factors contributing to the problem:

“They become parents later in life. There’s a loss of freedom, a loss of autonomy. It’s totally different from going from your parents’ house to immediately having a baby. Now you know what you’re giving up.” (Or, as a fellow psychologist told Gilbert when he finally got around to having a child: “They’re a huge source of joy, but they turn every other source of joy to shit.”)

What’s more,

When people wait to have children, they’re also bringing different sensibilities to the enterprise. They’ve spent their adult lives as professionals, believing there’s a right way and a wrong way of doing things; now they’re applying the same logic to the family-expansion business, and they’re surrounded by a marketplace that only affirms and reinforces this idea. “And what’s confusing about that,” says Alex Barzvi, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at NYU medical school, “is that there are a lot of things that parents can do to nurture social and cognitive development. There are right and wrong ways to discipline a child. But you can’t fall into the trap of comparing yourself to others and constantly concluding you’re doing the wrong thing.”

And there is more, but I suspect you get the idea.  To her credit, Senior concludes her essay by searching out the more subtle and elusive rewards of parenting that may not show up in social-scientific surveys while also suggesting that the problem may lie in our prior, possibly faulty, notions of happiness.

Here is one assumption, however, that wasn’t questioned:  the self-sufficiency of the nuclear family.  Senior drew attention to correlations between decreasing happiness and broken families, particularly for non-custodial single fathers; but she never questioned whether even an intact nuclear family was sufficient to the task at hand.  At one point, she quotes a couples counselor who, alluding to a documentary called Babies, explains,

“I don’t mean to idealize the lives of the Namibian women,” she says. “But it was hard not to notice how calm they were. They were beading their children’s ankles and decorating them with sienna, clearly enjoying just sitting and playing with them, and we’re here often thinking of all of this stuff as labor.”

Maybe it wasn’t a particular view of what constitutes play or work that accounts for the “calm.”  Perhaps, it was an intact social structure that included a large extended family, blood or otherwise.  Having not seen the film, that is merely speculation; but it seems plausible.

Along these lines consider this passage from Christopher Lasch’s The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics:

We wanted our children to grow up in a kind of extended family, or at least with an abundance of “significant others.” A house full of people; a crowded table ranging across the generations; four-hand music at the piano; nonstop conversation and cooking; baseball games and swimming in the afternoon; long walks after dinner; a poker game or Diplomacy or charades in the evening, all these activities mixing adults and children–that was our idea of a well-ordered household and more specifically of a well-ordered education. We had no great confidence in the schools; we knew that if our children were to acquire any of the things we set store by–joy in learning, eagerness for experience, the capacity for love and friendship–they would have to learn the better part of it at home. For that very reason, however, home was not to be thought of simply as the “nuclear family.” Its hospitality would have to extend far and wide, stretching its emotional resources to the limit.

Perhaps parenting has become such a chore because we have isolated the nuclear family from the resources it needs to succeed and even when we have sought help from the outside we have bought it from professionals and experts rather than receiving it from families and friends or even, neighbors.

Just a thought.