Market Power

Sloppy Jareds

This is the PowerHouse version of sloppy joes, named after a member of the household.

1. 1# ground beef
2. 1/2 c ketchup
3. 2 T mustard (prepared)
4. 2 T Worcestershire sauce
5. 4 oz beer (salted)
6. 1 - 2 T brown sugar (optional)

Cook the ground beef in 4 oz of salted beer.  Mix in the rest of the ingredients and simmer for 15".  I serve mine on buns with a few dill pickles.

Horry Kow, Chief Wahoo!

A t-shirt vendor raised the ire of some when he started selling "Horry Kow" shirts, a shirt produced because of the popularity of the Cubs' Japanese right fielder Kosuoke Fukudome.  Some find the shirt to be racist.  Others think it's funny and the t-shirt has sold well.

The Cubs have tried to stop the sales of the shirt and the vendor has considered a lawsuit.  But Richard Cloud emailed the following to the Chicago Sun Times, what might be the best line I've read on this subject:

'I find the Cubs organization's stand on this [Kosuke Fukudome T-shirt] issue to be hypocritical considering they sell, and MLB sanctions, an equally offensive racist caricature. If the T-shirt vendors bring Chief Wahoo into court, they win.''

Well played.  Chief Wahoo is, of course, the goofy caricature emblazoning Cleveland Indians stuff.  I wonder if the Cubs would have a different stance if they got a cut of the revenues from the sales or if Native Americans made up a larger proportion of their fan base.

Principles of Economics as Performance Art

After passing around the syllabus, Andrew Cassey stands beside his portable green chalkboard. Before him, people chat with their seatmates. Few take notes, but they pepper him with questions on international trade. He answers with careful thought, scribbling each solution on the chalkboard.

Thing is, Cassey is not in a classroom full of students. He's in Minneapolis's Bryant-Lake Bowl performing his buzzworthy, once-a-month lecture series about economics.

Bryant-Lake Bowl, a place where you can bowl on old wooden lanes while eating organic bison and local Star Prairie trout, is also a cabaret, with a theater tucked away behind Lane 1. The theater becomes a kind of geek haven on Tuesday nights, with entertainment like Books & Bars (eat, drink, talk books), the Bell Museum's Cafe Scientifique (eat, drink, talk science) and Cassey's "Principles of Economics" lectures (eat, drink, ...).

Cassey, a graduate student and instructor in the Department of Economics, conceived the notion of "economics as performance art" a year and a half ago during the Minnesota Fringe Festival, a Minneapolis-wide performing arts event. So he entered his idea in the lottery for the 2007 Fringe season and was chosen.

Story here.  Here's Mr. Cassey's website. 

Effective teaching, in my humble opinion, is part knowing your stuff, part being able to describe what you know, and part performance art.  Mr. Cassey takes this combination literally.

Hook Echo

Here is a picture of a tornadic storm that hit the Twin Cities suburb of Coon Rapids on Sunday.

It's a classic instance of a hook echo, where the counterclockwise rotation of the tornado literally sucks in the nearby precipitation, causing it to look like a fishhook to the radar. 

Here is the rest of the story from the local NWS.

Law and Economics on the Diamond

Doug Glanville on crime and punishment in baseball (via the Sports Law Blog):

The year that my team got into those four fights, minor league officials wanted to crack down, so they instituted a strict fine system with suspensions for anyone who left the bench to join in. This put quite a damper on the retaliation protocol, to the point where when one of my teammates charged the mound after being hit by a pitch, he stopped halfway and started scolding the pitcher. That was a first: intimidation by lecture.

Since in the minor leagues most players are living paycheck to paycheck, the new fine system worked like a charm. During that same on-field berating, I looked into our dugout from its midst and noticed that one of my teammates, Mike Carter, was breaking yet another unwritten rule by not joining his teammates in the rumble on the field. To raise his violation status from plain wrong to egregious, he was the only one who did not join his teammates. I asked him about this later. “Mike Carter has to pay his bills,” he replied.

The irony of these on-field altercations is that the fans are often much more likely to engage in a real fight than the players. When they fight in the stands to defend their teams (or for other reasons), they often go for the knock-out. Players just go to send the message, “We will not be intimidated!” while whispering, “Watch my right arm, I need that.”

Quick question:  is there any empirical evidence suggesting that limiting on-the-field skirmishes by levying fines improves attendance/fan willingness to pay/whatever?

To My Wife

Study: Smoking Bans Lead to More Drunk Driving Deaths

From the Journal of Public Economics comes an article by Scott Adams and Chad Cotti that finds that smoking bans lead to more drunk driving fatalities:

Using geographic variation in local and state smoke-free bar laws in the US, we observe an increase in fatal accidents involving alcohol following bans on smoking in bars that is not observed in places without bans. Although an increased accident risk might seem surprising at first, two strands of literature on consumer behavior suggest potential explanations — smokers driving longer distances to a bordering jurisdiction that allows smoking in bars and smokers driving longer distances within their jurisdiction to bars that still allow smoking, perhaps through non-compliance or outdoor seating. We find evidence consistent with both explanations. The increased miles driven by drivers wishing to smoke and drink offsets any reduction in driving from smokers choosing to stay home following a ban, resulting in increased alcohol-related accidents. This result proves durable, as we subject it to an extensive battery of robustness checks.

Here is a write-up in Science News. 

Is this the next step in a nationwide smoking ban?

Two on Youth Baseball: Metal Bats and Pitching

The first is on the use of metal bats and some of the surrounding legal questions.

The second is on the dangers to kids of pitching too much.

Congratulations, Stacey Brook

Stacey Brook,  one of the co-authors of the Wages of Wins, has taken a position at the University of Iowa and has started his own blog, Hawkonomics.  Dave Berri, has the story here.

Where I'll be on Thursday

Here.