Market Power

More on Naked Sushi

The feminist mantra:  do not tell me what to do with my body - as long as we're not talking about boob jobs or naked sushi.

"It's dehumanizing, the manner in which people are buying and selling sushi to be eaten off a woman's body. It's dehumanizing to be treated as a plate," said Cherry Cayabyab, president of the local chapter of National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum. ...

"It provides a forum to see a human being as an object -- and when women are viewed as objects, they are more likely to be violated," said Norma Timbang, executive director of the Asian and Pacific Islander Women and Family Safety Center.

Well, that depends on the type of object being viewed.   Viewing a woman as Jabba the Hutt (Southpark Reference) is not exactly attractive, unless you are another Hutt.

On a serious note, aren't the "plates" willingly choosing to do this and aren't they willingly taking any risk associated with this practice?   And, perhaps, by banning this practice, aren't we making those who would have chosen to be human dishes worse off?

Let's think about the economics of choice of the potential violator behind this statement:  "when women are viewed as objects, they are more likely to be violated."  I'm sure that Cayabyab is not referring to actual violations but attempted violations because if a woman is attacked but wards off her attacker, that is still a traumatizing event. 

The sort of person Cayabyab is worried about is one who is marginal between violating and not violating a woman.  He is also one who, if he goes to a sushi bar and eats off a woman's bare tummy, then he will go out and try to violate some woman afterwards.  It need not be the plate who gets attacked, which means there's a potential externality problem here.  That this could happen is plausible, but there are two questions that should be asked: 1.  how many men are marginal in this sense;  2.  what are the probabilities involved?  If the numbers are negligible, should we really ban the whole practice and thereby negate the benefits that those who willingly participate in the meal will receive?****  As a rough analogy, if a person drinks, she is more likely to get into an accident.  Does it then follow that we should ban drinking?

Lastly, it could be that someone who enjoys eating sushi off of a woman's body may be more likely to attempt to violate a woman. 

Previously, I blogged here about this naked sushi practice.  HT to The Emirates Economist for the naked sushi link.

**** I did a Google search and a Scholar Google search on various phrases to find estimates of the probabilities and numbers of marginal men but I could find no such estimates.

Adjustment for Time

I post the following not only because of its interest, but because of the amusing line describing this article on Fark.

An international team of astronomers has found a planet which, at about 15,000 light-years from Earth, is one of the most distant yet detected.

The new world was discovered when its parent star's gravity distorted the light from an even more distant star. The way the distant star's light changed betrayed the planet's presence. Two amateur astronomers in New Zealand helped find the world using "backyard" telescopes, showing that almost anyone can become a planet hunter.

The newly discovered world is several times the mass of Jupiter, but astronomers say the microlensing technique used to find the planet worked so well that it could be used to find much smaller, Earth-sized planets.

Here's a link to information on microlensing.  Here is some more information on the search for extra solar planets.  Here is the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia.

The description on fark said "Astronomers on that planet probably now looking at Earth, assuming it uninhabitable due to all that ice."  While it's an amusing comment, it's also an important thing to keep in mind.  The distance between our solar system and other heavenly bodies is so great that the light we analyze today was generated a long time ago (sometimes in a galaxy far, far away).  When we read about the discovery of a planet that is 15,000 light years away, any analysis of that planet is an analysis of what is was like 15,000 years ago, not what it is like today.  Still, when the lives of stars and planets are measured in billions of years, 15,000 years is not a long time.

Did You Know That...

... before 1995, it used to be illegal for schools in the University of Missouri system to charge resident students tuition?

The University of Missouri has reached an agreement to create a $10 million scholarship fund to settle a lawsuit over whether state residents were required to pay tuition based on 19th century law.

An estimated 104,000 former and current students, plus their children and spouses, can apply for scholarships.

The lawsuit, filed in 1998 by a group of students from the Columbia and St. Louis campuses, was based on an 1872 state statute that said all "youths, resident of the state of Missouri," should be admitted to the university system "without payment of tuition."

The university argued that students paid "education fees" and not tuition.

Here we go with semantics again.  Anyways, this silly law has since been changed. 

Why I Don't Worry about the Trade Deficit

Walter Williams describes why the hype over the so-called trade deficit is just that - hype.

I buy more from my grocer than he buys from me, and I bet it's the same with you and your grocer. That means we have a trade deficit with our grocers. Does our perpetual grocer trade deficit portend doom? If we heeded some pundits and politicians who are talking about our national trade deficit, we might think so. But do we have a trade deficit in the first place? Let's look at it.

Insofar as the grocer example, there are two accounts that I hold. One is my "goods" account, which consists of groceries. The other is my "capital" account, which consists of money. Let's look at what happens when I purchase groceries. Say I purchase $100 worth of groceries. The value of my goods account rises by $100. That rise is matched by an equal $100 decline in my capital account. Adding a plus $100 to a minus $100 yields a perfect trade balance. That transaction, from my grocer's point of view, results in his goods account falling by $100, but when he accepts my cash, his capital account rises by $100, again a trade balance.

Sweet 16

Today marks my 16th wedding anniversary to my wife, the better Dr. Market Power.  We are spending today as you would expect a married couple of two small durables to spend their 16th wedding anniversary.  My wife is at work and I am at home blogging and writing a book review.  We're such a romantic couple.

Pack Rat

Sometimes, people just need to throw stuff away.  This person should.

Link via The Door (who got it from John Palmer).

More NCAA Restrictions

The NCAA is nothing if not bureaucratic.  Now they can add one more thing to their rules book:  a limit on the number of pages that can be in a media guide.

For the past few years, Chad Moller has been one of the most prolific authors in America. In the summer of 2003, the University of Missouri sports information director produced a 484-page football media guide. Last summer, he followed it up with a 612-page tome.

Not bad when you consider it took Leo Tolstoy five years to knock out "War and Peace," a close cousin to Moller’s books in weight, if not literary significance.

The dual purpose of media guides is to provide reporters information about your team and to convince recruits to join your team - although not in that order of importance. But in recent years, the alarm on the NCAA’s favorite metaphor started screeching. Another "arms race" had broken out.

Last month, the NCAA passed a rule declaring that athletic media guides can be no longer than 208 pages. The rule primarily will affect football and men’s basketball guides. Missouri’s most recent men’s basketball guide was 320 pages.

The logic is that this will save athletic departments money and level the playing field for schools that can’t afford to produce massive books. The irony is that the bylaw was passed by an organization whose manual is 504 pages long and requires a team of experts at each school to interpret it.

As is well known, the NCAA does not allow its members' athletes to receive compensation close to the revenue generated - primarily the football and men's basketball players at many Division IA schools.  Since the player's can't be paid based upon their expected performance, programs devise ways to attract the athletes in non-pecuniary fashions. For example, here's a previous post on the use of comic books as recruiting tools.  The NCAA responds by banning some of those ways, and programs find new ways around the rules and ways around the new rules.   It's a big expensive game.

So, a program is going to violate NCAA rules if its media guide is 208.5 pages long.  Now programs are going to have to use resources to make sure that they say what they want to say in 208, resources that have alternative uses. (Assuming the NCAA actually has teeth regarding enforcement of this silly rule).  Assuming this new rule actually saves some member schools money, it's silly to think that each school won't spend that money on some different way to recruit athletes or on coaches.  Oh well.  I'm sure once some school finds a novel way of recruiting, the NCAA will ban that, and the game off the field will go on, and on, and on.  But this is what one expects of bureaucracies.

Markets in Everything - Sushi Style

Raw fish served on naked bodies - Chinese authorities are seeking to ban the practice.

China's State Administration of Industry and Commerce is cracking down on nude business promotions, with Beijing taking aim at naked shop models and restaurants where food is served on the bodies of unclothed women, state media said on Sunday. ...

The pronouncement forbids the service because it "insults people's moral quality," according to the Beijing Times. Serving food on women's bodies also "spreads commercial activity with poor culture," the paper said, citing the administration's notice.

Of course, this won't work with cooked food served piping hot.  "Excuse me.  Would you like your entree on a plate or on a blistered, naked body?"

So what's wrong with voluntarily insulting one's moral quality?  What's wrong with spreading "commercial activity with poor culture?"  I think a little poor culture is good for the soul.  If we ban poor culture, we'll have to ban late 1980's hair metal and Stag Beer (on the right, 2/3rds of the way down).  It's too bad that Jackie Chan is from Hong Kong, because there's a great Jackie Chan pun in here somewhere. 

HT to the Emirates Economist for the link and HT to Marginal Revolution for "Markets in Everything."

Faculty Political Leanings

As if we didn't already know, collegiate faculty donated overwhelmingly to John Kerry in the last election.

Link via The Door.

This Week's Reading

I am currently reading National Pastime by Stefan Szymanski and Andrew Zimbalist.  The authors provide an historical and comparative account of the development of soccer and baseball.  I will post a review of the book at The Sports Economist in the next week or so with a permanent link to the review here at Market Power.