Cafe Hayek

"A Clean and Snappy Place!"

McDonald's makes the world a cleaner place.  So concludes Wharton's Adrian E. Tschoegl in his 2007 paper "McDonald's -- Much Maligned, But an Engine of Economic Development."  Here's the relevant passage (from page 12):

McDonald’s emphasis on cleanliness, including or especially in restrooms, has led its competitors to upgrade their facilities.  Before the first McDonald’s opened up in 1975, restrooms in Hong Kong’s restaurants were notoriously dirty (Watson 1997).  Over time, competitors felt compelled to meet McDonald’s cleanliness standards.  The same thing appears to be occurring in China (Watson 2000).  In Korea, McDonald’s introduced the practice of lining up in an orderly fashion to order food; traditional practice was simply to crowd the counter, with success in ordering accruing to the most aggressive (Watson 2000).  In the Philippines, Jollibee mimics McDonald's clean and well-lighted look.

Here's yet another small way that capitalism makes humans' environment safer and more pleasant.

Capitalism Day

On this Earth Day, I celebrate capitalism -- the institution that, far more than any other, has made human lives clean, safe, dignified, and culturally rich.  Capitalism is also responsible for giving people the wealth and leisure to permit them to mis-perceive nature as loving and bountiful, and to enjoy nature in a way that few of our pre-industrial ancestors could ever have enjoyed it.

So, on this Earth Day, I offer you here my essay, inspired by the work of Julian Simon, entitled "Cleaned by Capitalism."  Here are the central paragraphs:

Before refrigeration, people ran enormous risks of ingesting deadly bacteria whenever they ate meat or dairy products. Refrigeration has dramatically reduced the bacteria pollution that constantly haunted our pre-twentieth-century forebears.

We wear clean clothes; our ancestors wore foul clothes. Pre-industrial humans had no washers, dryers, or sanitary laundry detergent. Clothes were worn day after day without being washed. And when they were washed, the detergent was often made of urine.

Our bodies today are much cleaner. Sanitary soap is dirt cheap (so to speak), as is clean water from household taps. The result is that, unlike our ancestors, we moderns bathe frequently. Not only was soap a luxury until just a few generations ago, but because nearly all of our pre-industrial ancestors could afford nothing larger than minuscule cottages, there were no bathrooms (and certainly no running water). Baths, when taken, were taken in nearby streams, rivers, or ponds, often the same bodies of water used by the farm animals. Forget about shampoo, clean towels, toothpaste, mouthwash, and toilet tissue.

The interiors of our homes are immaculate compared to the squalid interiors of almost all pre-industrial dwellings. These dwellings’ floors were typically just dirt, which made the farm animals feel right at home when they wintered in the house with humans. Of course, there was no indoor plumbing. Nor were there household disinfectants, save sunlight. Unfortunately, because pre-industrial window panes were too expensive for ordinary families and because screens are an invention of the industrial age, sunlight and fresh air could be let into these cottages only by letting in insects too. Also, bizarre as it sounds to us today, the roofs of these dwellings were polluted with all manner of filthy or dangerous things. Here’s the description by historians Frances and Joseph Gies, in Life in a Medieval Village, of the roofs of pre-industrial cottages:

Roofs were thatched, as from ancient times, with straw, broom or heather, or in marsh country reeds or rushes. . . .  Thatched roofs had formidable drawbacks; they rotted from alternations of wet and dry, and harbored a menagerie of mice, rats, hornets, wasps, spiders, and birds; and above all they caught fire. Yet even in London they prevailed.

Peace and free trade.

Promoting Safe Driving

My George Mason University colleague Gordon Tullock famously remarked that the best way for government to reduce the number of traffic fatalities is for it to mandate that a sharp steel dagger be mounted on the steering column of each vehicle and pointed directly at each driver's heart.  Forget about all other regulations and mandates; that dagger will ensure safe driving.

This town in Germany is using the same sound economic reasoning that inspired Gordon's remark.

Progressive Superstition

Here's a letter that I sent today to the Gray Lady:

Opposed to globalization, Jeff Milchen asserts that "The only truly sustainable path for business in the 21st century is localization" (Letters, November 23).  Mr. Milchen should learn some history.  He can begin with Fernand Braudel's 1981 book The Structures of Everyday Life, which details the living standards of ordinary Europeans during the late middle ages.  This era was emphatically one of localization: people consumed only locally grown foods and locally made clothing.  All building materials were local.   There were no highways, railways, or CO2-emitting engines to pollute the local atmosphere with greenhouse gases or with foreign goods and foreign ideas.

But paradise had its price.  Starvation was common, as was death by plague.  Giving birth was more dangerous for women than a game of Russian Roulette. People lived in tiny one-room dirt-floor huts without indoor plumbing. During the winter, some of the farm animals (all local!) shared these accommodations.

What little "business" there was during the long era of localization - subsistence farming - might have been sustainable, but human dignity and human life certainly were not.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux

I googled "Jeff Milchen" and, not surprisingly, found that he frequently is identified with so-called "Progressives."  Ironic, isn't it, that "Progressives" advocate a return to the economic arrangements of the dark- and middle-ages?

"It's Getting Better All the Time"

If the New York Times and other major, elite news outlets are to be believed, the only real question today is whether ordinary people will meet their end by being roasted or flooded to death by man-made global warming or by being crushed -- as they crawl in search of crumbs of toxic food not grown locally -- beneath the diamond-studded heels of boots worn by the richest one-percent of the population.

Patrons of the Cafe know that Russ and I are generally skeptical of most of the fear-mongering about the state of humanity.  Admittedly, we are both deeply influenced by the late Julian Simon, who is, in my opinion, the most underrated economist ever to live.

So I'm delighted to learn that Manoj Padki has started the wonderful new blog "It's Getting Better All the Time" (whose title comes from this book written by Julian Simon and his student Stephen Moore).  In this blog, Manoj will report and document many of the countless ways that humans are progressing.  I will visit Manoj's blog at least once each day.

Cleaned by Capitalism

I sent this letter today to the Baltimore Sun:

You again call upon government to force us Americans to reduce our emissions of CO2 ("Green and right," November 2).  And like nearly everyone else demanding further regulation of markets in the name of environmental protection, you overlook the fact that the very markets that you want to restrain save millions of lives annually by making people's living environments cleaner.

For evidence, read Margo Thorning's essay that appears today just inches from your own editorial.  In "Ending energy poverty," Ms. Thorning reports that "About 1.3 million people - mostly women and children - die prematurely every year because of exposure to indoor air pollution from burning biomass for fuel."  These deaths happen routinely in developing countries because people there have so little access to electrification, internal-combustion engines, and mass-produced consumer goods that they must burn biomass in their homes.  So in developed countries – whose denizens enjoy ready access to electric heating, home delivery of fuel oil, and other life-saving wonders - the capitalism that people loudly fear might raise global temperatures a few degrees over the next several decades silently yet effectively saves thousands of lives each and every day.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux

And Think of the Horrors Unleashed by Penicillin!

Here's one of the most absurdly ridiculous lines that I've read in a long time; it was penned by Alexander Cockburn, writing in the November 5, 2007 issue of The Nation:

Line up some of the more notorious Nobel Peace Prize recipients, such as Kissinger, and if you had to identify the biggest killer of all it was probably Norman Borlaug, one of the architects of the Green Revolution, which unleashed displacement, malnutrition and death across the Third World.

Shameful, on so many levels (one of which is that this sentiment drains credibility from the bulk of this article by Cockburn, which attempts to expose Al Gore's hypocrisy).

(HT: Joe Mann)

By the way, Gregg Easterbrook, in his tribute to Norman Borlaug (from the January 1997 issue of The Atlantic) wrote that

Perhaps more than anyone else, Borlaug is responsible for the fact that throughout the postwar era, except in sub-Saharan Africa, global food production has expanded faster than the human population, averting the mass starvations that were widely predicted -- for example, in the 1967 best seller Famine -- 1975!   The form of agriculture that Borlaug preaches may have prevented a billion deaths.

And here's an earlier entry from here at the Cafe about Dr. Borlaug.

Mike Munger is never late

Or so you might think after reading his essay on the economics of meetings. What is certainly true is that a man of Mike's talents certainly spends too much time in meetings.

Tyler's New Book

I highly recommend Tyler Cowen's new book, Discover Your Inner Economist.

Here's one of my takes on it.

Jibbitzing in the Prosperity Pool

Earlier this month, Karol and Thomas and I vacationed at our favorite vacation spot: Cape Cod.

While there, Thomas and I bought our first pairs of Crocs.  They're wonderful shoes for casual wear.  The woman who sold them to us told us about something that we'd never before heard of: Jibbitz.  Jibbitz are little decorations that fit into any one of the many holes featured on each pair of Crocs.  These tiny items are mostly ornamental -- allowing each Croc wearer to express his or her individuality -- but they also are functional, for they can help to identify one pair of Crocs from another.

(Neither Thomas nor I wanted any Jibbitz, by the way.)

The fascinating thing about Jibbitz, though, is that the inventor turned this idea into a business that he and his wife sold for $20 million.  What a  wonderful outcome!

Note that this invention isn't high-tech -- it's about as simple as simple can be.  Yet it is indeed something that enough consumers choose to buy at prices that make the product profitable to produce.

Jibbitz -- another few drops of prosperity in our vast Prosperity Pool.

Abundant Social Change

I just started reading Brink Lindsey's new book, The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America's Politics and Culture.  I'm just about 60 pages into it, and so far I'm enjoying it immensely.  I especially like this observation (that appears on page 3):

American capitalism is derided for its superficial banality, yet it has unleashed profound, convulsive social change.  Condemned as mindless materialism, it has burst loose a flood tide of spiritual yearning. The civil rights movement and the sexual revolution, environmentalism and feminism, the fitness and health-care boom and the opening of the gay closet, the withering of censorship and the rise of a "creative class" of "knowledge workers" -- all are the progeny of widespread prosperity.

Ooops

I took down my bottle top explanation until further review. There's a flaw in the reasoning so I'm now I'm even more perplexed. I hope to have a new post up next week.

Bottle tops

I went to the Nationals baseball game last night and was surprised to discover that when you buy a bottle of Pepsi, the concession stand person removes the top before letting you walk away. She was apologetic and I quickly discovered why—it's much harder to carry two sodas, a hot dog and a pretzel when the tops aren't on the bottles. When I asked her why she had to remove the caps, she explained that they don't want people throwing the tops onto the field. I have a different explanation. Can you come up with one?