Art Carden, Forbes Blog: How Economics Saved Christmas.
Every Who down in Whoville liked Christmas a lot
But the Grinch, who lived just north of Whoville, DID NOT
He stood and he hated the Whos and their noise
He hated the shrieks of the Who girls and boys
For fifty-three years he’d put up with it now—
He had to stop Christmas from coming, somehow
He asked and he questioned the whole thing’s legality
Then his eyes brightened: he screamed “externality!”
He reached for his textbooks; he knew what to do
He’d fight them with ideas from A.C. Pigou
This idea has merit, he thought in the frost
A tax that was equal to external cost.
James Andreoni, Justin M Rao, VoxEU: Do they know it's Christmas? New insights on communication, empathy, and altruism. At a time when many people are asking themselves what to give their friends and family for Christmas, this column asks why we bother to give anything at all. In the economic laboratory, subjects exhibit significant levels of altruistic giving and aversion to unfairness. Outside the laboratory however, we encounter vast amounts of poverty and inequality and yet only give a tiny fraction of our income to charity.
Ran Abramitzky, Liran Einav, Oren Rigbi, The Economic Journal: Is Hanukkah Responsive to Christmas? We use individual-level survey and county-level expenditure data to examine the extent to which Hanukkah celebrations among US Jews are driven by the presence of Christmas. We document that Jews with young children are more likely to celebrate Hanukkah, that this effect is greater for reform Jews and for strongly-identified Jews, and that Jewish-related expenditure on Hanukkah is higher in counties with lower shares of Jews. All these findings are consistent with the hypothesis that celebration of religious holidays is designed not only for worship and enjoyment but also to provide a counterbalance for children against competing cultural influences.
Gregor Schubert, Princetonian: The cruelty of Christmas gifts. True human affection should be a continuous and calendar-independent flow of generosity, and I hope that this year we will fight to abandon the cruel practice of Christmas gifts. While there might be an economic rationale for these transactions, the human cost of such materialist emotional impoverishment is simply too great for those of us with kind hearts to tolerate.
Robin Hanson, Overcomingbias Blog: Christmas Signaling: Why don't we give each other cash for Christmas? The usual answer is your Christmas gift is a signal, not just of your willingness to sacrifice cash for them, but also of how well you know them, to know what they want. But if so then why do we often make and distribute Christmas wish lists? One answer might be that the gift receiver is like a teacher leaking answers to students to raise her teacher rating – maybe the gift receiver cares more that third parties think her gift givers know her well, than that they actually know her well. But in this case wouldn't she be trying to hide the fact that she passed around a wish list? If everyone who sees her get a gift was shown the wish list, who could she be fooling?
Mark Whitehouse, WSJ: How Christmas Brings Out The Grinch in Economists. Given the fanfare and billions of dollars in spending it generates, you might think Christmas is the best thing to happen to the economy all year. But some economists say we would be better off without it. In the cold, hard analysis of the dismal science, Christmas is a highly inefficient way of connecting consumers with goods. Squeezing a big chunk of people's spending into a year-end frenzy of gift-buying generates an abundance of ill-considered presents -- millions of unwanted ties, picture frames and toe socks that, had they found the right owners, could have brought a lot more satisfaction.
Allen R. Sanderson, Chicago Life: Gift Books for Econ Lovers. Extending this playful side, economists have also ventured into the realm of fiction. No mistaking them for Agatha Christie; nevertheless, these aren’t bad: the ‘Marshall Jevons’ volumes, Murder at the Margin, The Fatal Equilibrium and A Deadly Indifference; three by Russell Roberts, The Choice, The Invisible Heart, and The Price of Everything; and two by Michael Walden and M.E. Whitman Walden, Micro Mayhem and Micro Mischief.
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