Free When to Rob a Bank: ...And 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

costly ham?
    Bargain wheat, expensive flour,
    The oldest villain’s market power.
     
    Just one seller makes us nervous,
    Like that U.S. Postal Service:
    They may offer bargain prices,
    But who disciplines their vices?
     
    Middlemen have long been blamed
    For every market that’s inflamed,
    Yet better explanations come
    From many a Hyde Park alum.
     
    Modern views from Chicago-Booth
    Give a nuanced view of truth,
    Steven Levitt and John List
    Made each of us a freakonomist .
     
    We let data speak its mind
    No matter what Friedman opined
    And find the price of fruit and veg
    To be driven by the market’s edge.
     
    Like the tail that wags the dog,
    Marginal thinking clears the fog:
    Sellers, buyers, traders too,
    Interact and prices ensue.
     
    A kiwi costs 33 cents
    Simply because no one prevents
    Another farm or New York store
    From entering and selling more.
     
    In contrast apples may be dear,
    For reasons that will soon be clear:
    Picking them’s below our station,
    To lower costs we need migration.
     
    Bananas have a different story,
    Seedless magic, breeder’s glory,
    Cheap to harvest and to ship,
    Who cares if workers get paid zip?
     
    Each crop’s method of production,
    Where it grows and how it’s trucked in,
    Satisfies some needs quite cheaply
    While other costs will rise more steeply.
     
    A buyer’s choices matter too,
    For nonsense stuff like posh shampoo,
    Prices are not down to earth,
    The more you pay the more it’s worth.
     
    Behavior is as behavior does,
    Maybe some things are “just because,”
    Much of life’s a mystery,
    A habit due to history.
     
    For prices, though, it’s competition
    Plus tariffs set by politicians,
    That determines whether we see
    Such delightfully cheap kiwi.
    Bravo.
Pete Rose Provides a Lesson in Basic Economics
(SDL)
    Some time ago, Pete Rose signed a bunch of baseballs with the inscription “I’m sorry I bet on baseball.” According to media reports, he gave these balls to friends and never intended them to be sold for profit.
    But the estate of someone who received some of these balls decided to put thirty of them up for auction. There was speculation that they would sell for perhaps many thousands of dollars.
    That is when Rose himself stepped in and delivered one of the fundamental lessons in economics: as long as close substitutes are available, prices won’t get very high.
    When Rose heard that these balls were being auctioned, he offered to sell balls with the same inscription for just $299 on his own website , effectively destroying the market for the auction-bound balls. True, the newly signed balls wouldn’t be perfect substitutes, because a collector could still say he had one of the original thirty. For that reason, you wouldn’texpect the auction price of the old balls to fall all the way to $299. Indeed, the auction was called off and the balls were sold for $1,000 apiece.
    (Hat tip to John List , the only baseball-memorabilia-salesman-turned-economist I know.)
If Only God Had Had Corporate Sponsorship . . .
(SJD)
    . . . in the book of Genesis, when the world is created. Can you imagine how rich He could have gotten by selling the naming rights of every animal, mineral, and vegetable?
    If God was unlucky to toil in the days before corporate sponsorship, the Chicago White Sox are not so unlucky. They have just announced that for the next three seasons, their evening home games will begin at 7:11 P.M . instead of the customary 7:05 P.M. or 7:35 P.M. Why? Because 7-Eleven, the convenience store chain, is paying them $500,000 to do so.
    I’ve lately noticed advertisements showing up in a lot of unlikely venues: stamped onto fresh eggs and printed on airplane barf bags, for instance. But I have to admit there is something particularly creative about affixing a value to time itself, especially if you can capture that value for your own benefit.
    Maybe I will write more about that tomorrow™.
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