Jacob Grier

The blue dots represent cities with a surplus of single women. Tan dots are cities with a surplus of single men. Here’s the map. Richard Florida says I’m moving in the wrong direction:

By far, the best places for single men are the large cities and metro areas of the East Coast and Midwest. The extreme is greater New York, where single women outnumber single men by more than 210,000. In the Philadelphia area and greater Washington, D.C., single women outnumber single men by 50,000. I met my wife outside Detroit, where the odds were greatly stacked in my favor - single women outnumber single men by some 20,000 there.

In fact, single women outnumber single men in many large cities around the world, even though men outearn women at all ages, according to Lena C. Edlund, a Columbia University economist. One reason young women in the prime marriage years - the 25-44 age range - flock to big cities is to compete for the most eligible men. And smart women who gravitate to vibrant cities are more likely to stay single - for longer, at least - because they rightly refuse to settle for someone who can’t keep up with them intellectually or otherwise.

But women do have an advantage in the American West and Southwest. In greater Los Angeles, for example, there are 90,000 more single men than women. In Phoenix and the San Francisco Bay Area, single men outnumber single women by roughly 65,000. There are considerably more single men than women in San Diego, Dallas, and Seattle, too. Each of these regions has grown substantially over the past two or three decades, offering jobs in everything from high tech to construction and services. As numerous studies of migration show, men - especially those in regions with declining economies - are initially more likely to move long distances for economic opportunity, while women are more likely to stay closer to home and family.

At least Portland’s got distilleries. And hey, gin never turns you down and goes home with the guy who has the bigger blog.

Relatedly, here’s Tim Harford explaining Edlund’s economic theory about why big, successful cities tend to be home to more single women than men.

[Thanks to Zack for the link.]

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports on an nineteen state effort to start imposing local sales taxes on internet purchases:

On Tuesday, Washington joins 18 other states that require some e-commerce businesses to collect sales tax. About 1,100 online retailers have volunteered to collect, and in return, Washington promises not to sue them for back taxes they might have owed. Three more states are on the way to adopting the law.

This isn’t an issue I’ve followed closely, but I’m generally in favor of tax-free sales as a useful form of competition that keeps local rates in check. (They’re not technically tax-free now, but the legal obligation to pay falls on consumers and is largely unenforceable.) Changing the point of taxation to the location of the buyer from the location of the seller also threatens to hit businesses with high compliance costs:

The law was poorly thought out, said Karen Evans, accounting manager at Aptech Systems Inc. in Black Diamond.

“I’ve been talking to our state representative, trying to figure out how in the world this legislation got passed,” she said. “I know there are reasons for it. Some of the bigger companies are pushing for it, but they’re doing it on the backs of all the small businesses around the state.”

The problems facing small businesses are two-fold. First, businesses must change their online software to recognize Washington’s 350 taxing districts.

“Ninety-nine percent of our sales goes out of state,” Evans said. “We’ve had to invest $1,000 so far for something that affects less than 1 percent of business.”

Second, if the law goes national, small businesses will have to decipher the thousands of tax codes in the U.S. and file tax returns up to several times per year for each of them.

And the end of this paragraph stands out:

The change does not affect deliveries to outside of the state, wholesale sales, services, sales of vehicles, aircraft, mobile homes or boats or towing companies. Florists also are exempt.

Why are books taxable and flowers not? No logical reason, florists just happen to have a well-connected lobby. That’s the kind of random exception that’s bound to creep into local tax laws, making life hell for retailers trying to keep track of them all.

An amusing story from the Chicago Tribune:

Few names are more associated with the University of Chicago than Milton Friedman’s.

But that’s exactly the problem, say some faculty who want to put the brakes on a plan to name a new research center after the Nobel Prize-winning economist.

In a letter to U. of C. President Robert Zimmer, 101 professors—about 8 percent of the university’s full-time faculty—said they feared that having a center named after the conservative, free-market economist could “reinforce among the public a perception that the university’s faculty lacks intellectual and ideological diversity.”

Aside from his achievements as an advocate for free markets and individual liberty, Friedman was an unquestionably brilliant economist with contributions to the field that were not limited to any particular political views. There are far worse names to have associated with one’s university.

[Hat tip: Newmark’s Door.]

In today’s edition of Dust-Up, Paul Roberts predicts the end of food and I call for tearing down export restrictions. Read it here.

Today in Dust-Up, Paul Roberts and I discuss whether or not the FDA has enough regulatory power. You can guess where I come down, but Paul doubts the agency’s efforts too.

On a related note, Peter Van Doren lays down some skepticism about food safety regulation in this Cato Daily Podcast.

Update: Also, whoever writes the headlines at LATimes.com deserves a raise.

Previously:
Back in The Jungle
Don’t blame Milton!

Ezra Klein has a weird post up today accusing libertarians of being hypocritical in their opposition to laws requiring restaurants to post calorie information:

It’s a bit rich to watch libertarians and associated anti-government types oppose a regulation that gives consumers more useful information. This, after all, is how markets are supposed to work best. Consumers have better information, can pursue their preferences in a more coherent manner, and the market can provide, adapt, and innovate in response. Take trans fats, which have disappeared from just about every food save margarine now that they need to be listed on the package. If caloric information was posted, a lot of currently popular items would become unpopular (the awesome blossom, say), and restaurants would innovate towards lower calorie, but still filling, foods. In the absence of that information, the incentives to do so are weak. It’s one of those soft ways of making the market work better towards a social end: We agree that people should be healthier, people agree that they want to be healthier, and all this would do is give them the information to make healthy decisions. It would not actually bar any foods from production or sale. But because there’s some odd desire among some on the right to lionize unhealthy decisions (smoking!) and defend existing business models, whatever they may be, to the death, this regulation faces a steep uphill climb.

Information is a market good, too. It’s not a perfect market and one can reasonably argue that in some cases mandating label inclusions is for the public good, but more information isn’t always an improvement. Nor is government always better than the market at deciding what information ought to be provided; recall the mandated GM labels that were roundly ignored in the Netherlands. Corruption by lobbying is also an issue, as with Diageo’s manipulation of low-carb wine labeling and its current push to force nutritional labeling on the entire alcohol industry.

Requiring chain restaurants to post calorie counts might indeed have the effects that Ezra hopes it would by making people think twice about what they eat and the social benefits might be worthwhile, but there’s nothing unlibertarian in being skeptical of mandates for information that we’re not sure customers are demanding in the first place.

Update: See Megan McArdle, too.

Previously:
Guess what? Burgers make you fat!
Do people know what they want to know?

Ezra Klein, who hates tipping and drinks PBR, continues the debate over tipping:

I’d be interested to know: If there was no such thing as tipping, would average employee compensation end up higher or lower? Or would the mean stay the same, but there’d be less variation? In other words, does tipping mean that waiters and bartenders get a better deal than they would otherwise, or does it allow employers to give them a worse deal and use the occasional success stories to pass low pay off as a personal failure? Are there any studies on this sort of thing?

I’m not aware of any formal studies on the subject, but I expect that in many situations replacing a custom of tipping with wages paid directly by restaurants or with a servis compris system would negatively impact servers’ income. This would be true if, as in my experience, the generous tippers more than compensate for the stingy.

To put it more precisely, the average tip is greater than the median, skewed upward by the few customers who tip exceedingly well. It’s a kind of price discrimination that servers can use to their benefit, getting the most out of good tippers without alienating those unwilling to pay as much. A flat pricing system would have to aim nearer the median, eliminating the gains from people who’d gladly pay more and those who are so price sensitive that they no longer come in at all.

Of course this model isn’t backed up by hard data and its accuracy would vary with the location and type of establishment. A flat system would also be more to the benefit of shy or surly waiters who aren’t good at coaxing tips from friendly customers. But from my own experience, switching away from a system of voluntary tipping is just about the last thing I’d like to see happen in a restaurant I work in.

Previously:
The point of tipping
Tipping revisited

Note to Forbes.com newsbots: The Cato Institute receives just a small share of its funding from corporations. Nor is it a corporation itself, especially a corporation that sells down-market women’s fashion. You can’t buy stock in it. But if you could, you would, now that former Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis president William Poole has announced he’s joining the staff.

Starbucks’ headline-making brand recreation is a bit tarnished today by an adverse court ruling. As decided in California, the company owes baristas about a hundred million dollars in tips that were distributed to shift supervisors and managers. The coverage makes it look like corporate was stealing from their workers. The L. A. Times, for example, leads by saying that “Starbucks got caught with its hand in the tip jar.”

The practice might have been illegal under California law, but it wasn’t stealing. If baristas (oops, I mean “partners”) didn’t like the practice they were free to work elsewhere or renegotiate terms. It’s also a sensible way to do business: if supervisors spend most of their time doing the work of baristas and cashiers, there’s no reason for them not to get tipped out with the other workers. Restaurants with on-the-floor managers who serve tables do exactly the same thing.

Assuming Starbucks’ compensation model is effective, this ruling won’t change much. It’s a one-time bonus for baristas who get to take advantage of a stupid law and a one-time hit for the corporation that’s getting nailed by it. It could lead to raises for supervisors to compensate for lost tips and will likely slow down pay increases for non-management positions. It doesn’t do much of anything to change incentives, except perhaps to make managers less invested in running fast, friendly stores. This isn’t a victory for workers’ rights; it’s a forced replacement of a business model that was working well to another, possibly less efficient one demanded by court decree.

It’s not because of its big government leftism; that’s to be expected. What I really dislike about the page is that only gives opposing space to big government conservatives, the kind of people who are just like the editors themselves, except that they happen to vote Republican. David Brooks and William Kristol don’t exactly contribute intellectual diversity (or, in the latter case, intellectual anything).

Today’s case in point is an op/ed contribution arguing that John McCain isn’t really a conservative. Because he’s eviscerated the First Amendment? Because he makes a federal issue out of every little thing? Because he’s hawkish on foreign policy? Nope, because he’s a fairly solid supporter of free trade — one of the few issues redeeming the candidate in the eyes of old school conservatives.

Update 3/6/08: Dan Griswold, Dan Drezner, and Megan McArdle all slap the piece around more eloquently than I did.

In his “How’s Your Drink?” column this weekend, the WSJ’s Eric Felten has a suggestion for Starbucks: take away the tip jars. He then critiques the practice of tipping as a pernicious expression of aristocracy. Says Felten:

In America, receiving tips long ago lost any stigma; indeed, the “partners” at Starbucks regard their gratuities as an acknowledgment that they are more worthy than their counterparts at McDonalds. But making one’s employees dependent on the kindness of strangers is not without cost. Jim Romenesko, known for his media Web site, also runs the popular Starbucksgossip.com, where baristas and customers post comments and questions about the chain. As Mr. Romenesko has noted, the most heated, vitriolic discussions are those on tipping. Most of the postings are by levelheaded employees who make it clear that they deliver good service tips or no. But there is no shortage of workers angry at the “cheap bastards” who risk getting secretly “decaffed” if they don’t tip. One barista reminds customers: “I control your daily dose of crack!”

If the tip jar encourages staff animosity, it also makes many customers uncomfortable. On the Starbucksgossip site, plenty of coffee-drinkers echo Mark Twain’s complaint about tipping: “We pay that tax knowing it to be unjust and an extortion; yet we go away with a pain at the heart if we think we have been stingy with the poor fellows.”

Since I make a solid chunk of my income in the form of tips, it’s no surprise that I think Felton gets this wrong. How much animosity is there, really? My experience is exactly the opposite: tipping encourages rapport between staff and customers. Research backs this up, with Cornell Professor Michael Lynn finding that tips are not correlated with good service nearly so much as they are with pleasant, memorable interactions.

There’s also the matter of price discrimination. While this doesn’t apply so much to the mostly automated systems at Starbucks, I’ve written before that this is a good reason to put tip jars in indie coffee shops:

… skilled baristas in the US are underpaid. Compared to other markets, American consumers are less discriminating in their taste for espresso drinks. This means that artisan baristas are unlikely to stay in the field for long. Higher wages could induce them to stay, but the price sensitivity of many consumers makes this hard to fund. Tipping serves as a form of voluntary price discrimination for customers who care about good coffee without raising prices for those who don’t.

Felten concludes:

It’s not that we tip waiters because they are paid so little; they are paid so little because they can expect to make up the difference in tips. Starbucks is known for paying relatively well and providing respectable benefits. Yet, without the tip-jar take, the company would have to raise its wages commensurately to maintain the same caliber of employees. Perhaps prices would rise too, but I suspect many would be happy to have the full, unambiguous cost of the transaction up on the board. As things stand, the tip jar subsidizes the company’s payroll costs. So when you toss a dollar into the cup, you’re really making a donation to Starbucks — and I can think of needier beneficiaries.

He’s got a point. But let’s not forget that cash tips do have the advantage of finding their way into baristas’ pockets without being fully reported to the IRS. There are many beneficiaries worthier than Starbucks Corp., but the federal government isn’t among them.

Update 3/4/08: Spelling of Eric Felten’s name corrected.

[Via Rumors Daily.]

A slightly altered version of my op/ed with Tom on health care and tobacco taxes appears today at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, along with a local story about an expected decline in long-term revenues and increase in online or out-of-state cigarette sales.

Update: We’re in the Orange County Register, too.

At Slate, coffee-loving economist Tim Harford writes about a paper [.pdf] by Caitlin Knowles Myers finding that baristas can be sexist, forcing female customers to wait an average of 20 seconds longer for their drinks than men do. Does this mean women are suffering at the hands of chauvinist baristi? Aside from the meagerness of the time in question, I think the study misses an obvious point: faster service isn’t necessarily better service.

The difference might actually arise from reverse discrimination: perhaps women’s drinks take longer because male baristi are eager to impress them. Having worked in several coffee shops over the years, I will cop to sometimes putting excessive care into the beverages of female customers, doing my best to get the espresso and the latte art just right. Unless the customer doesn’t care about the presentation and quality of the drink — a minority in most of the shops I’ve worked in — that’s better service, not worse.

The author’s thoughts on tipping are also problematic. Myers believes that baristi may give lesser service to women to curry favor with supposedly higher-tipping males. This assumes that speed of service is the primary determinant of tipping. My experience suggests that this is not the case. Rather, one reason people frequent coffee shops is that they enjoy the feeling of community and recognition these places offer. As Michael Lynn’s research has revealed, intangibles in the customer-server interaction often have more to do with tip amounts than do objective measures of service. Spending more time with customers may be a way making customers happy and increasing tips, the exact opposite of what Myers’ paper assumes. A friendlier, mutually enjoyed greeting might be all that accounts for that 20 second difference.

Myers’ paper does present an interesting finding, but 20 seconds isn’t enough to convince me of nefarious forces at work.

[Via Radley Balko.]

Update 11/14/07: Myers has a very nice response to commenters at Tim’s FT blog, going into a bit more detail about the study and what it may imply.

Debi points my attention to the SnūzNLūz, an April Fools’ Day alarm clock from ThinkGeek:

The SnūzNLūz uses the very complex psychological phenomemon known as ‘HATRED’. Basically it’s human nature to wish harm upon your enemies. Similarly, it’s human nature not to give your enemies gobs of cash so that they can grow big and dominate the world with their totally wrong, stupid and invalid point of view. ThinkGeek realized that. That’s why everytime you hit the snooze button, the SnūzNLūz will donate a specified amount of your real money to a non-profit you hate. The problem of sleeping in is solved.

Sound familiar? I like the new wrinkle about donating money to a hated enemy instead of to a beloved charity or wasting it in a paper shredder, but I think I had them beat on this one.

And yes, I’d definitely buy one if it were a real product.

At Agoraphilia, Glen Whitman wonders why bowling is more popular for dates than mini golf. The obvious answer is that bowling alleys serve alcohol, but that just brings up another question: why don’t mini golf courses have bars? I like his answer:

Drunken players tend to take longer to finish, thereby delaying other customers. In a bowling alley, this effect is very limited – you usually only get ten frames, you only get two shots per frame, and you can only delay people whose games have not yet begun. But in a mini golf course, slow play can affect every player behind you on the course. And while there is allegedly some limitation on the number of swings (6 swings max, I believe), players sometimes flout this rule, and in any case 6 swings can take twice as long as 3 (the usual par).

With most inter-customer externalities, the natural solution is to “tax” the players who create it. This could be accomplished by simply charging more per drink. But if the required tax is especially large – as it might be in this case, given how many other players are affected by any one player’s slowness – then the total price could be higher than most players are willing to pay. And with few enough buyers, it’s just not worthwhile to incur the fixed costs of setting up bars, acquiring liquor licenses, and so on. Boozehounds will just have to wait ’til the nineteenth hole.

I suspect another factor is that bowling alleys have broader appeal. Families can bring kids to bowl while not interacting much with drunken revelers in lanes nearby, whereas on the mini golf course there will be lots of interaction between holes. Bowling alleys can also bring in business on slower nights with league competition, something that I haven’t seen with mini golf. Though given the sudden rise of adult kickball leagues, this could happen.

Anyway, the real point of this post is to mention that by next summer DC hipsters will be able to enjoy their mini golf, drinks, and acute sense of irony all under one roof. That’s when the H Street Country Club is due to open:

According to [developer Joe] Englert, H Street Country Club will be replete with “a lot of wood benches that resemble a locker room” and “a lot of plaid.” The food will be all-American, no-frills “picnic” fare, and the holes will be littered with D.C. memorabilia celebrating go-go greats and bands like Fugazi. “The Positive Force hole is really amazing,” he raves, adding that his eight-year-old daughter has been one of the course’s chief designers.

The article also mentions that city regulations are, unsurprisingly, one obstacle to the venture:

The only question is whether Englert will need a special set of permits to make his mini-golf dreams a reality. For example, says attorney Michael Fonseca, Englert might have to get a mechanical amusement license, which, “in the old days,” regulated video games and pinball machines. In D.C., everything from Pac Man to pool tables warrants a special license, he says.

Fred Moosally, general counsel for the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board, says there’s no precedent for establishments serving up booze and golf balls. “We don’t have any miniature golf bars,” he says.

Tim Harford, author of The Undercover Economist, coffee lover, and all around nice guy, has started blogging for the Financial Times. Check out his new project here.

Building on the success of the Ansari X-Prize, the foundation announced today the new Google Lunar X-Prize. Google will award a $20 million purse to the first group that successfully sends an unmanned rover to the Moon.

I wrote about the X-Prize’s award for a practical 100 mpg car at A Better Earth a few months ago. Also, check out this Marginal Revolution post for an interesting story of how the prize’s funders cheaply insured the purse thanks to “experts” at Boeing and McDonnell-Douglas declaring that it had virtually no chance of being won.