An Economist Gets Crunch?

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In An Economist Gets Lunch, Tyler Cowen displays considerable cred as both an economist and a foodie.  But it’s his economist’s take on our passion for eating out that makes Lunch special.  Read the book: you’ll view  upscale eateries, ethnic restaurants in strip malls, street food carts, and everything in between in a whole new light—thanks to your new lens on  producers costs and incentives.

Another useful topic is restaurants’ cross-subsidization of low-margin offerings with higher-margin offerings (like keeping the prices of entrees down by overcharging on drinks). That leads to a discussion of how local cinema operators make up for scant margins on tickets with higher-margin receipts from the refreshment counter. (Overall, about ½ of ticket receipts and sometimes up to 90% go back to the movie makers during a film’s typical opening weekend, writes the author.)

In their mission to refresh, cinemas cast popcorn in a stellar role.  Raw materials are inexpensive; popping is a snap—via production that the cinemas control. Movie operators also enjoy flexibility in pricing and have been known to stimulate demand through a witches brew of fat, salt, and oils.

No crunch at the cinema (click to enlarge)

Popcorn Is Quiet. But I can no longer remain silent: popcorn  becomes cinema’s über-snack only when you add its sonic properties to the mix. It is a snack without crunch. That’s high-functioning design, given the near intimate distance between patrons in a crowded theatre. So don’t expect to score chips and unshelled peanuts at your local cinema’s refreshment counter (you might find nachos, but they’ll be hot and flaccid.) After cinemas introduced popcorn in the early 1930s, the high-margin snack helped keep them afloat during the Great Depression, notes Cowen and his alpha source, Popped Culture. But a sotto voce snack was at a premium for another reason: beginning with talkies in the late 1920s, you ingested dialog with your ears, not your eyes.

No need to get up: it's in the frigid-chair.

A Gateway Snack. With popcorn leading the way, snacking in the cinema has excelled as a role model for subsequent mindless eating wherever Americans watch TV. Perhaps Mr. Cowen’s next econ text will highlight TV dinners and TV trays as complementary goods?  “TV,” laments Brian Wansink in his cautionary Mindless Eating, “is a triple threat."

Aside from leading you to eat, it leads you not to pay attention to how much you eat, and it leads you to eat for too long. It’s a scripted conditioned ritual—we turn on the TV, we sit down in our favorite spot, we salivate, and we go get a snack. Eating or drinking gives us something to do with our hands, and it occupies us while we focus on the plot of our television show and on the questions that it raises: “What else is on?” “Have I seen this one before?” “Did the Flintstones really happen?” (103)

Mindless eating in front of the TV and silver screen has inspired descriptors of “trance eating” and “negative multitasking.” What could be timelier than the latter, given our market-driven cult of fractionating our attention span via multiple devices and activities. So what else are you reaching for as this excursion pulls into the station?

Abigail Washburn: World Music "Rock Star"

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My fellow Americans, you just might have missed it: banjo virtuoso Abigail Washburn has become a roots/world music rock star on the British music scene. With added persuasion from her outstanding touring band, her latest album, City of Refuge, released in January of 2011, was a top-ten critics pick of the year in fROOTS and Songlines, Britain’s leading roots/world music magazines. In May of 2011, Washburn graced the cover of fROOTS and last week she was one of four finalists in Songlines’ artist of the year award.

In the U.S., Refuge has gotten strong reviews but less than the UK’s royal treatment. It wasn’t among the Times annual picks or on the many best-of annual lists on NPR’s audacious music web site. It did turn up as number 27 in the No Depression community’s top releases of the year.

Why the Anglo-American disconnect? Do Brits and other Europeans, given their location and enduring cultural connections with their former colonies, embrace a broader palette of multicultural musical influences? Abigail Washburn’s current work certainly fits that eclectic bill. It’s an uncommon hybrid of indie pop, Chinese and other East Asian influences (Washburn has lived in China and speaks Mandarin), and of course, American roots music.

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There are many moving parts in this broader discussion: Does the United States still embrace vestiges of musical and cultural isolationism? Our internal cultural diversity, of course, is second to none. (although we do melt much of it down via American pop music)  Do our exceptional domestic musical assets distract us from overseas influences?

Some of our top artists, of course—Ry Cooder, YoYo Ma, and Washburn’s husband, Bela Fleck--have been passionate in creating hybrid music that reaches beyond our shores. And college campuses and other venues periodically host leading lights on the international scene. Still, when did you last  listen to Eleftheria Arvanitaki, Titi Robin, Kala Ramnath, or Bassekou Kouyate? --all world music artists of the highest order.

When I spoke with Washburn’s symbiotic musical collaborator Kai Welch  after an October 2010 concert by the band at the Iron Horse Music Hall in Northampton, Massachusetts, he agreed that the group's music would have been impossible two generations ago. How the world has contracted!  Back then, (my own salad years in the late 1960s), America’s idea of world music (the term, of course, hadn’t been coined) entailed Latin Jazz, jazz meets bossa nova, Olatunji, Makeba and Masakela, and, of course, George Harrison sitar riffs.

Co-conspirators Washburn and Welch

Through his songwriting and indie sensibilities, Welch—a gifted vocalist and multi-instrumentalist--has nudged Washburn toward greater emotional resonance.  (Her previous cd, the Sparrow Quartet, with a violin, cello, and two banjos, was no less multicultural, but many considered it too cerebral.)

Like  Sparrow, Refuge offers beautifully nuanced arrangements and ensemble playing, but it’s far more grounded, more emotionally immediate. And when you hear the group live (as in the clip below), you’ll appreciate its improvisational prowess as well. That clip is from a video accompaniment to Bob Boilin’s show on NPR. Prepare for musicianship that is disciplined yet adventurous in support of genre-transcending music. So forgive me for the earlier label of world music rock star!

I’m with Mensa

What's worse than being stuck in glacial traffic at rush hour on the Calvin Coolidge Bridge outside Northampton, Massachusetts?  Answer: the same predicament but with the bumper sticker Mensa Member staring you in the face. Not the more common, less self-congratulatory version that simply reads "Mensa Society," but the one that  proclaims the bearer’s membership in the cult. (and, hence, his unambiguous superiority) So I sat in traffic behind this egotist who might just as well have flipped me the bird for five minutes palpitating, “I’m smart! And then some--I’m Mensa smart!”

I did try to ignore the barrage, but five minutes behind him in dead-cat-bounce traffic seemed an eternity and a Mensatudinus day. If you ever have the need, do what I did:  undress the felonius bumper sticker in your mind's eye and substitute the sticker below.

For the final word on intelligence--emotional, social, Stanford-Binet--we turn to the sons of Gama Rex in Gilbert & Sullivan's Princess Ida. They begin their ditty about 33 seconds into the clip below:

LBJ & The Invisible Gorilla of Succession

Last week’s excerpt in The New Yorker of Robert Caro’s account through the prism of  LBJ's biography of the Kennedy assassination and its immediate aftermath (The Transition) offered one riveting insight after another. My favorite was an Invisible Gorilla moment of inattentional blindness when at Dallas’s Parkland Memorial Hospital, Johnson and his retinue, having just learned that Kennedy had expired and fearing the prospect of a conspiracy, elected to leave the building before the press discovered Kennedy's fate.

Caro writes in The New Yorker:

As the new President of the United States headed out of the hospital, Robert Pierpont of CBS News caught a glimpse of him but did not follow. No other reporter followed him, or apparently knew he was even leaving. "We weren't thinking about succession,"  Newsweek's Charles Roberts explained later.  .  . Nobody attempted to follow him although he was then President of the United States."

[With Kennedy’s death, Johnson immediately became the country’s 36th president. The subsequent oath was a ceremonial formality.]

Only one member of the press, the official White House photographer, Captain  Cecil Stoughton, had the independence of mind  to follow the new president’s decisive exit to his limo and the airport. It was Stoughton who later snapped the iconographic photo of LBJ--framed by Lady Bird and Jacqueline Kennedy--taking the oath of office on Air Force One.

Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simon's Invisible Gorilla experiment asked subjects viewing a video of basketball players to count passes on a gym floor. When a man in a gorilla suit appeared in the frame, a significant number of the observers (typically 50%) failed to notice. The experiment revealed the diminished cognitive/perceptual flexibility that accompanies hyperattentiveness in a demanding cognitive task--a task that was also reinforced by the subjects'  emotional commitment to completing the exercise itself.

The emotional valence at Parkland Hospital was, of course, through the roof—fueled by an uncertain, unfolding, epic tragedy-in-the-making. Little surprise, then, that the press was hyperfocused both emotionally and cognitively on JFK. Since becoming vice president, Johnson had morphed from his leonine days in  the Senate into a nexus of self-doubt. His swagger had become a shrug; he feared expulsion from a second-term ticket. Why focus on a decidedly second fiddle when you might miss the outcome to the story of the decade? But with the news of his own assumption, Johnson was reborn.  His posture straightened,  his facial expression waxed determination and fierce concentration. And he became the  cool, decisive leader that his aides had known in the Senate.

The New Yorker article is excerpted from The Passage of Power, the 4th volume--due out in May--of Caro's magisterial LBJ biography. Without question, Caro is Johnson's Boswell.

Dr. House's Big Product Placement Adventure

House's uber-pill

In homage to the final season of House, let's reconsider the series' high-profile product placement of the good doctor's addiction of choice, Vicodin. Many a review and Web comment have assumed that Fox and the drug's manufacturer, Abbott Laboratories, are in bed via some sweetheart product placement deal. (As far as I know, both have been mum on the matter.)  Uncritical attribution of joint sleeping arrangements, I think, borders on conspiracy theory.

One thing, though, is for sure: the prescription drug has become a household word thanks to Vicodin's hold on House. A year ago, Nielsen tracked viewer recall of product placements on network dramas and sitcoms from February 1-28. The House-Vicodin team placed second. The drug, in fact, has been conspicuous throughout the series and is every bit the match in scarfability of Reeses Pieces in E.T.

But is that the sort of brand recognition that Abbott Laboratories craves? And does it translate into sales?  When I want/need a prescription drug for pain, my physician typically writes a scrip based on his recommendation. Lately I've refrained from asking, "Doc, my brand of choice is Vicodin" or, alternatively, "I'd like a scrip for the stuff that works so well for House." (Perhaps I need to take greater charge of my own medical destiny.)

Mucho  Street Cred

My physician, of course, didn't  learn about Vicodin from House. He already knew about it as a  pill- prescribing cognoscento. That leaves a final market where the House-Vicodin buzz may have made a difference: the illegal street trade. Here, it's no stretch to imagine that Vicodin,  combined with Dr. House's  "attitude" (he even uses his walking stick on the wrong side to spite the medical establishment) has gained big dividends in street cred and popularity.

It would be cynical though--even for this blog--to assume that the good folks at Abbott Laboratories might somehow approve. Still,  we'd do well to survey whether and how much Vicodin's sales have morphed with its higher profile. And, for that matter, whether the  drug's negative role on the show correlates with sales. (The sales numbers, a marketing professor friend confided, are there for the taking.)

Raising Canes. Drugs aside, House has done great things for another byway of the economy--the market for walking sticks and canes. Begin your makeover at the cane and stick emporium, fashionable canes and walking sticks, which offers ten variations of walking sticks that have appeared on the show, including the Flame, Alpaca Feather, Derby, Tourist, and, of course, the Skull Handle.

Source: fashionable canes and walking sticks

Take it from a Web site that knows its marketing:

Whether you prefer one of Dr. Gregory House's more classic looks or the racy, exciting designs of either the House Flame Canes or the more recently used "Death's Head Cane," you are sure to appreciate these exact replicas of the walking canes used on the show!

And remember, House canes will keep on giving as you keep on aging.  Ditto for the House mystique. Remember, he's not dead, he's in syndication.

Click here for the product placement forerunner, Paris 1882: Edouard Manet Meets Bass Ale.

Amherst, Massachusetts Votes: Super Tuesday 2012

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At 8:45 a.m., a lineup of "reserved for voters" parking spaces outside Amherst’s Bangs Center—the town’s  largest polling place—revealed one of rural Western Massachusetts’ secure wide-open spaces. That’s because the primary is a de facto Republican affair and  Republicans in the feistily Democratic college town are as scarce as declining tuitions at its colleges and university. A visit to the polling center revealed several dour douenas from the League of Women Voters hunkered down for a long haul (7 a.m. to 8 p.m.) of  linoleum watching.

Amherst, Massachusetts Contemplates Moral Hazard

Moral Hazard at Reichenbach Falls

Two weeks ago, firefighters from Amherst and surrounding communities rescued 22-year-old Scott Merrick, who had fallen 25 feet from the top of Bare Mountain in the Notch, a popular hiking venue in the Mount Holyoke Range State Park. Merrick’s mishap occurred late at night when he ascended the hill alone, following a dispute with his girlfriend at the bottom.  The rescue involved 35 firefighters, including members of the department’s technical rescue team, who responded at 11:30 p.m. to the girlfriend’s call. They wrapped things up at 3:30 a.m. Merrick, who sustained minor injuries, left the hill on a stretcher and was transportated by ambulance to Baystate Medical Center in Springfield. The cost of his rescue: around $10,000.

Charging Merrick for the rescue “is not something I’m actively pursuing at all, Amherst Town Manager John Musante told the Daily Hampshire Gazette. “Implementing a fee-for-service component—does that have the unintended disincentive for people to call for help when they most need it?” With that said, Musante, who is admired both for his financial acumen and kind-heartedness, may have been primed for his response: he recently spent several months out of circulation after falling  in September while walking his dog.

Still, $10,000 is no bag of shells. A year ago, State Representative Stephen Kulik, a liberal democrat from Worthington, Massachusetts, introduced a bill (H.650) that would allow municipal and state governments to recoup emergency response costs attributable to reckless or intentional behavior. Many of the communities that Kulik represents have more vertical topography than Amherst; they also have tighter resources, making costs tougher to absorb.

A light at the end of the spelunk

But when there's clear negligence, why should the towns foot the entire bill? Consider the 12-hour rescue in 2010, for example,  by Amherst  responders of 25-year old Maya Hersh from a cave in the hills of nearby Leverett. Ms. Hersh got stuck in a cave's narrow orifice. To her discredit, she confessed to having been  stuck and unstuck there before (the first time without emergency assistance).

Whether Kulik's bill becomes law or not, Scott and Maya would do well to read Laurence Gonzales' Deep Survival.

In Survival, the author warns that overconfidence nurtured in the low-risk milieu of home and culture can get us into unforgiving trouble in nature. With dire results, climbers often over-weigh the challenges and goals of ascent while treating descent as an afterthought. Experienced hikers get disoriented in the woods when poor visibility, adverse weather, and other natural forces scramble their mental maps. Skiers  who venture just off the path at ski resorts may encounter frictionless slopes and unstable geology. And unwary swimmers at some of Hawaii's beautiful beaches are just a rip tide away from their final aquatic adventure.

In recent posts, this blog has examined the dangers of other wishful perceptions:  viewing interspecies liaisons as central casting in a peaceable kingdom and experiencing what the psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls amnesiac vacations.  Happily, we can all learn from Scott and Maya's picaresque adventures. One question  does, however, cry out: Given the lightening learning curves and voracious networking skills of this blog's readers, do we still need a Kulik bill to become a Massachusetts law?

Thinking, Fast & Slow, about Tourism

Reflected realities at Versailles

If you didn’t quite finish Daniel Kahneman’s invaluable 400+ page Thinking, Fast and Slow, you may have missed his insights near the book’s end on the psychology of tourism. For starters, Kahneman distinguishes tourism from visits to resorts that offer restorative relaxation. Tourism, he emphasizes, is “about helping people construct stories and collect memories.” In that, the camera has been a mighty enabler:

The frenetic picture taking of many tourists suggests that storing memories is often an important  goal, which shapes both the plans for the vacation and the experience of it. The photographer does not view the scene as a moment to be savored but as a future memory to be designed. (389)

According to Kahneman, these activities and their role in post-vacation story building serve an aspect of self that dwells in memories—that creates coherent tales in the rear-view mirror. He contrasts that "self" with a counterpart self that dwells in experience—that lives in the moment.

It is fair to add, though, that tourism frequently offers extraordinary "here and now" opportunities for the photographer--as hunter, as collector, as aesthete. Still, with the camera, like smart phones and other devices* that distance us from the experiencing self as we connect, it's how we use it. Use it compulsively, you might need to lose it.

*which, moreover, have begun multitasking as high-quality cameras as well.

TWO WHO CRIED WOLF

                                      
What did pioneering social scientist Stanley Milgram and comedian Redd Foxx have in common?

Both cried wolf at least once too often.

In 1962/63, Milgram gained national notoriety for laboratory experiments that conned subjects into believing that they were administering electric shocks to other subjects to facilitate their learning. (The subjects on the receiving end of the juice were imposters; the shock machine only appeared to shock.) When the true subject, i.e., the shocker, had second thoughts about administering increasing voltage, a confederate of Milgram’s—an authority figure in a lab coat—would urge the shocker to continue. The experiments served up the shocking conclusion that Americans were excessively obedient in the company of an authority figure.

Milgram paid a price for the downside of his fame and his methods—Some colleagues and students were never quite sure when and if he might be putting them on.

Which brings us to a tale of disbelief at Harvard University on November 22, 1963. Here it is, according to Thomas Blass’ terrific book about Milgram, The Man Who Shocked the World:

So when . . . [Milgram] burst into Emerson Hall in the midst of a lecture by Talcott Parsons about the nature of the social system, and rushed to the podium yelling, I have horrible news. President Kennedy has been shot in Dallas,” he was met with outrage and skepticism. Barry Wellman, now a sociologist at the University of Tornoto remembers blurting out: You’re just doing another experiment on us.

And what about Redd Foxx? Scarcely an episode of the 1970s TV series Sanford and Son went by without his character, Fred Sanford, clutching his chest and crowing to his long-suffering son, Lamont, “Oh! It’s the big one; Elizabeth [Fred’s deceased wife], I’m coming to join you, honey!”

Years later (1991), when Mr. Foxx collapsed at a rehearsal on the set of his new CBS television series, The Royal Family, his costar, Della Reese, and much of the cast at first suspected that he was treating them to his signature routine. But they soon realized the truth: Mr. Foxx was down for the count at age 68.