Milton Friedman on the Teevee

So yes, my blog really is just a sad parrotting of other things that Jeff puts up on 2nd Glance... It is worth repeating though, especially if you find yourself in frequent discussions over the proper size of government (as I often do). Watch this! I am still hopeful that I can add some value eventually, and my first step may just be this entertaining/creepy video of the Milton Friedman Choir...

Surprise Utility Vehicle

Apparently Hondas are full of nifty features that I would have heard about if I hadn't told the salesman to just shut up and sell me the car. I had already decided I wanted the car before the sales pitch; it was just a matter of pricing. As for the BS the salesman was trying to get me to ooh and ahh over, Jeff puts it eloquently: "I ascribe non-zero value to these features, yet did not calculate them into my offer price and so I essentially didn't pay for them."

Finding these little easter eggs after the fact, however, can make my day! On the highway today I noticed that the "PASSENGER AIRBAG OFF" light was still glowing long after it should have normally turned off. Grrrrrrrrreat I thought, my brand new car needs service already. Eventually I realized that I had left my bag of textbooks on the passenger seat, and neglected to buckle it in :-P Apparently the car has a weight sensor to prevent the passenger from being decapitated by the air bag when not wearing a safety belt. I wonder what other marvels lie in store as I get better acquainted with my car...

A very special deal

The wonders of specialization and increasing returns to scale never cease to amaze me.

Yesterday, at my local grocery store, I purchased a loofah sponge for one dollar!!!!!!!!! Not impressed? Hmm. Well maybe thinking about what a dollar is really worth would help. It's easy to think of it in terms of what you can trade for one dollar (a pack of gum, parking for half an hour...?), but one of the best ways is to think about trading your labor. Even if you earn as little as $6 an hour, one dollar is worth just 10 minutes of your applied effort. We can assume that whatever magical force (let's call it the market) provided this loofah to me was willing to exchange it for the equivalent of 10 minutes of my time. How foolish! Suppose I asked you to provide me with a loofah, without using this pesky "market," in 10 minutes...

How are you going to grow it? Did I mention that the loofah is native to tropical Africa and Asia? What? You don't have any seeds and you don't own land on another continent? I guess you'd better get cracking. Oh and I don't want you to just bring back any old gourd. It has to be processed and dried to make the web of fibers that make it good for scrubbing. And yeah, you should probably pull the seeds out, too. Then I want you to do some research and write a clever blurb about how to use a loofah and, I suppose, write it in painstaking calligraphy on a label. A pretty seaside picture would be nice as well. I hope you've got watercolors. Then I want you to wrap the loofah in a lightweight, waterproof, transparent material (plastic would work; boy I bet you wish you owned a refinery) and figure out for yourself how to make an adhesive to attach the label. Bring it back to me in the U.S., and I'll consider this a fair deal. You have 10 minutes. Ready? Go.

A living wage?

Nope, this has nothing to do with UVA's living wage campaign; rather, it stems from a project I'm working on for my International Trade class on microfinance. Grameen Phone, a partnership between microlender Grameen Bank, and Norwegian telecom leader Telenor, provides cell phones to poor Bangladeshi women by extending loans, providing reduced rate calling minutes, and allowing the women to repay the loans with profits they make from "renting" the phones to other villagers on a call-by-call basis. Long story short, while fleshing out a specific factors model, I found that Grameen Phone's introduction of cell phones actually decreased the wages of "cell phone ladies;" however, empirical evidence obviously shows that they are better off with the phones; their total income is four times the per-capita average. The catch? Although the wage which the model ascribes to labor decreases, the cell phone ladies are also small-scale capitalists! The returns they gain from their capital (the cell phone) far outweigh the decreased wage. The lesson seems to be that if you are an entrepreneur, and want to increase your wealth, it may "pay" to decrease your wage!

P.S. Wow, I'm a horrible person. This is my first post in 4 months!

Are obese children more likely to play video games?

Notice I didn't ask "Are children who play video games more likely to be obese?" The conventional wisdom answer to this question is yes, but both of my college roommates are glaring counterexamples.

Is it possible that children who are obese are more likely to play video games? Video games provide a sense of escape (fantasy) and empowerment (control of a superhuman character, or an entire army) that may appeal to someone whose physical situation is less than ideal. On a more basic level, video games may be a substitute for more physical play, such as sports. An obese child likely gains less utility from soccer, swimming, or tag than a fitter child would, making the video game alternative more appealing. Even if both children initially prefer the video game, diminishing marginal utility will lead them to tire of it and pursue something else. While the child of average weight may decide to go play a game of tag, the obese child may not consider this option to be as appealing as even the stale video game, and may continue playing.

I have no data to support this, but it's a different look at obesity (and the ever-demonized video game). Note that you never see studies correllating studying or reading with obesity making the news, even though the physical effects on the body are similar.

Liters of fun

Cabfare to and from Garota de Gávea: R$23,00
Dinner that I didn't order: R$25,00
19 liters of beer: R$161,50

Waking up the next morning without a hangover to hike to the top of Corcovado with two marmosets following you for half of the trail: priceless.

Now about those beers. They came from a "serpentina," an icy tap in the center of our table. This made for a highly entertaining evening (and I'm sure a highly profitable one for the bar owner as well). Beer from the tap was metered with a digital gauge and billed at the rate of R$8,50 per liter. I'm not complaining. By American standards, this is cheap; however, it turns out that a 400ml glass of that same beer, taken from a tap at the bar and delivered to your table by a waiter costs R$3,30 (R$8,25 per liter). My "anything in bulk is bound to be cheaper" mentality fell through on this one, but the utility gained from watching 5 Americans, a Turk, and a Brazilian serve their own draft beer was well worth the extra 25 centavos per liter, and the bar gets away with a smaller waitstaff, less glasses to wash, and more beer revenue. Not bad.

"Why Cars are Great" or "How Not to Take a Hike"

Say what you want about the marvelous benefits of large metropolitan areas and public transit, but when it comes to getting away from it all, the frontier-craving American in me still needs a car. I made plans with my Rio roommate and our gringo friend "João," to go on a hike today, the origin of which was to be my our Copacabana apartment. The logistics of reaching our destination, normally a simple matter of get-in-car-pick-up-friends-GO, have become a multi-modal nightmare.

João needs to get to our apartment in Copa, which will require a theoretically simple trip on the Metro. Once he arrives at our apartment, our best option seems to be walking about a mile to the end of the beach to take another bus which will bring us (after making a multitude of stops) to another neighborhood, where we will again walk through the city a ways before commencing our actual "hike."

Public transit seems to be great at getting large numbers of people moved between heavily trafficked areas, but when you're on a schedule (we need to get out there, up the mountain, and back down before the sun sets and the crazies come out) it does a lousy job.

Estimated start time of hike: 12noon
Our Hike-
Total distance Hiked: 2 miles
Total Hiking Time: 4 hours
Elevation Change: 770 meters
Miles per Hour: 1/2

Arriving by Public Transit-
João's distance traveled: 7 miles
Transit Time: 3 hours
Elevation Change: 0 meters
Miles per Hour: 2 1/3

The current time is 12:45pm, I'm sitting here blogging, and I'm not hiking.
I miss my car...

Addendum
The hike never happened. We arrived where the bus was supposed to stop and it never came. When asking someone at a gas station about the bus, he said he had never heard of it. Awesome. On the bright side, the beach was a nice satisficing move on our part.