In a free market, individual responses to inflation commonly cause more inflation. Individual defenses against economic instability cause an economy to become more unstable.

This process might be called the irrationality of the market. It is so in the sense that it converts rational individual choices into collective results that are profoundly irrational. Far from being a benign or beneficent force, the market when left to itself is an unstable system that has repeatedly caused the disruption of social and economic systems in the past eight hundred years.

In a heavily footnoted text, this statement has no supporting citation, so it must be part of the common wisdom. But I must have missed that part of Econ 101.

Is this statement supportable? Is there evidence that this is the case? Or has every instance of “market instability” resulted in an over-correction by forces “outside” (or dominant players inside) the market?

It’s been about a year since purchasing the HDTV and the associated DirecTV package. Meanwhile, our viewing of “normal” television fare has been steadily declining. We hardly ever watch anything live: we have other things to do with our time. And more often than not, the children are selecting shows from Netflix, YouTube, or the producer themselves, instead of from the previously recorded episodes of Sesame Street, Jake and the (cute little) Never Land Pirates, Little Bear, Wizards of Waverly Place, or whatnot.

In the interest of completeness, I’ve compiled a list of what we normally watch with any regularity, and where it can be found now that we’ve cut the downlink. The challenge now will be getting some of them off the Internet and on the big screen. Apple TV, perhaps? Boxee?

Did I mention it’s cheaper when you’re not paying for the umpteen channels of shit on the TV you don’t watch? People don’t care about “channels.” They care about shows.

Your pricing skills suck. Are you intentionally trying to lose money and ridership?

Suppose that a family of four — or six — wanted to travel to Disney World from New York. This is a not uncommon occurrence, and provides the basis for over 250 flights per day by many airlines from more than five airports in the New York metropolitan area. The cost of air travel is currently going up, up, up due to some small upset over in the oil-producing regions, so where a seat on JetBlue from JFK to MCO would once have cost $50, it’s now between $100 and $150. This is an opportunity! And you’re missing it!

And you’re missing it in a big way. Look, I understand that it takes capital to improve infrastructure, and that you’re hobbled by riding on tracks owned by others, but it’s almost like you’ve intentionally set your prices to encourage folks to drive. For me to take a family of six to Disney World by plane costs almost as much as staying in one of Disney’s “moderate” resorts and going to all of the parks every day of my visit, so I, and many others, might be looking for a slightly less wallet-reducing option. And the first thing that comes to mind is driving. But who wants to drive the first 24 hours of their vacation? Or, who wants to spend three days driving, two days there, and three days driving back? No one. But the other option is too expensive. Buses? Ha! That’s worse than driving, especially with little kids. How about the train?

This is where you’re completely missing the opportunity. The cost per seat from, for example, New York Penn Station to Orlando is $106 per person for a 21 hour trip. That’s slightly cheaper than the more expensive JetBlue seat, but you forget the time differential. Time is, after all, money, which is why travelers choose to fly on JetBlue for 2 hours for $150 instead of suffer on Amtrak for 21 hours for $106. You need to take your utter inability to get anywhere fast into account when pricing your service. And when you’re more expensive, even if only by $7, than the cheapest option, you completely lose. No one wants to pay more money for the privilege of getting somewhere slower.

Yet the cost of airfare gets worse as one moves away from hub airports. This is where you have an advantage. It costs less to feed from Poughkeepsie to New York and thence to Orlando than it does for JetBlue to fly direct from Newburgh to Orlando. In terms of convenience for me, I’d much rather leave from Poughkeepsie than from JFK. If you can get your prices down to something approaching the cost of gasoline plus a hotel room, you might have a fighting chance in earning my dollar. But then you totally destroy any opportunity you had with the sleeper options. $358 for a room for two people? $658 for a slightly larger one? What? You think you’re a hotel on Times Square? I’m just looking for a contained, flat place for my kids to lie down so that they don’t spend the night in the bar car.

You have two options: lower your prices, or build faster trains. Because we’re sure as Hell not going to pay $658 for two cots or $640 for uncomfortable seats when we could pay less than that on gas and a swank room at the Holiday Inn Express.

The other day I had to purchase a prescribed drug. The pharmacy had a simple question for me: Did I want them to bill through the insurance company, or did I want to pay cash? If they billed through the insurance company, then the cost of the prescription would be applied to the deductible amount. If I paid cash, then the insurance company, not knowing of the cost, would not apply it to the deductible. One supposes that there’s a third option: to pay cash and then report the expense to the insurer.

This question came up because of a difference in the prices between the two methods: $300 more to bill the expense through the insurance company.

No, thank you. I’ll pay cash.

Is it a coincidence that on the heels of one of the worst economic crises since The Depression, artisan cocktails began making a huge comeback?

Actually, no, it’s not. It’s typical.

In The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History, David Hackett-Fischer observes that when the going gets tough, the tough get to drinking. Figure 4.24 on page 227 shows a remarkable correspondence between the rate of inflation and consumption of distilled liquor. As Mr. Hackett-Fischer notes in the caption,

[L]iquor consumption and drug use peaked when real incomes were falling rapidly, prices were surging and unemployment was increasing. A comparable surge in drinking (to the highest recorded levels in American history) occurred in similar circumstances during the climactic years of the eighteenth century price revolution. A long decline in alcohol consumption coincided with the Victorian equilibrium.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes data on expenditures on alcoholic beverages, and the Centers for Disease Control do the same for alcohol consumption. Historical data on alcohol consumption is a little harder to locate at the CDC than it is at the OECD. Both data sets lag by a few years.

Expenditures and consumption are not the same things, since price per unit of alcohol varies. Strangely, expenditures are falling, and have been. Consumption in the United States was decreasing from 1983 to 2000, but since 2001 is back on the increase. Since I’ve not noticed the prices dropping, purchasers are likely shifting consumption to cheaper products without reducing overall consumption. This could be either a switch from Dogfish Head to Budweiser, which I doubt, or from beer to distilled liquor, and, thus, cocktails.

I bought the DENSO part 2349005 {#36531PLE003} OE-TYPE OXYGEN SENSOR from Rock Auto, after pricing the same part elsewhere. Denso is the original equipment manufacturer, so this is the same part you’ll get from Honda, for $150 to $300 less. The Honda dealer who read the code from the on-board computer wanted an arm and a leg for the part, $450, plus another $80 to change it.

However, the sensor was in so tight, and I was unable to get any leverage on it, that I ended up taking it to a shop just to get the old one removed. The mechanic there had it out, and replaced, in a jiffy, for only $25.

Part of the problem with the current players is that their customers are the hotels, airlines and advertisers, not the purchasers of the product they’re selling. If they don’t think they can stand the competition, perhaps they should look at improving their product.

By the way, does anyone still use MapQuest?

That’s not worth the subscription price.

I’ve always read the paper for local news, not national. I don’t expect the newspaper to be broad in scope, but to focus on those things that others do not cover. It might still do this, but the news needs to be current as well as local. I have no desire to read the day after about an event that I would have attended if I had known about it the day before. I have no desire to read election results two days after the election, when the on-line edition of the same newspaper published those results the night of the election. I certainly have no desire to read last week’s baseball scores. Perhaps the newspaper is no longer printed locally and the press deadline is too early to allow printing current news. If that’s so, perhaps that was a bad decision. Perhaps one needs to abandon currency entirely and become a weekly opinion piece. Or abandon the pretense of being a news paper.

It didn’t have to be this way. But the choices y’all are making are driving your business into the ground.

Now where will my children learn to love the comics?

The problem with fracking, as with other environmental issues, is one of negative externalities. That is, the company extracting the resource does not bear the full costs of its operations, and certainly not the full costs of its failures. This creates a moral hazard, both at the extraction company, which cares nothing for the people who can no longer drink their water, and in the government, which aligns itself with the corporation rather than the citizens, as in Pennsylvania.

Beyond that, I fail to understand why an industry that burns off natural gas from oil wells as waste would be granted the privilege to extract natural gas in a manner that most likely has adverse effects.

• general coverage of national politics
• excellent coverage of local politics
• high-quality investigative journalism
• cogent and thoughtful editorials
• amusing letters to the editor
• yesterday’s sports scores and the current standings
• the comics

I think I’ll cancel my subscription.