Furious at the Gas Station

I often find myself spinning into a furious rage at gas stations and it has absolutely nothing to do with the price of gas. It is caused by other drivers, such as the way people park at the gas station, how they cut through the service bay as opposed to going around it, leaving their vehicle at the pump after they've filled their tank, etc. I cannot understand the rationale behind any of this. If you park square and in the designated spaces, then everyone can maneuver more efficiently. If you go around the service bay to enter or exit the station, you cut down on the potential for accidents. If you need to buy a soda after getting gas, pulling up to the store opens up a pump for someone else. The question is why doesn't anyone seem to do any of these things? Do gas stations not have an incentive to enforce some level of rules in their parking lots to facilitate their operation?

The only way I've found thus far to subdue my rage is to find the smallest area between two vehicles I can fit through and drive my truck through it. Usually someone is watching. Maybe eventually someone will come to the same conclusions I have and gas stations will become more pleasant places.

Various Stuff

• One reason for the higher price of milk: sawdust!
• From Arthur Brooks: money can't buy happiness, but earned success does.

Current Projects

Here is what I'm currently trying to figure out by channeling my inner Tyler Cowen.

• How can you combat the universal human tendency to stop in door ways? How many times have you been to a large event and the human traffic stops moving the moment you get to the door because everyone before you has stopped in the door? How can incentives be used to get people to take enough steps to keep the flow of traffic moving?
• How can you get people to stop donating garbage to charity or giving you garbage? For example, someone can't bring themselves to throw away a worn out piece of furniture, so they give it to their church. On an individual level, if someone gives you garbage, you can give them garbage in return. At some point things should stop because the original giver no longer wants you to reciprocate. On the charity level, I'm not sure what to do.

The Good and Bad of NIMBY

I've come to the conclusion that NIMBY has at least one virtue: it is proof that we've become wealthy and prosperous enough that we can afford to keep various productive activities out of our backyards without massive consequences.

On the other hand, if taken far enough, NIMBY could kill the goose that lays the golden egg; i.e. any business that someone finds offensive will be run or kept out of town thereby destroying or preventing prosperity. See Marlin, Texas for an example.

Urban Agriculture

Urban farmers in New York, Oakland, and elsewhere are raising fruits and vegetables in cities. They use vacant lots, backyards, and anywhere else they can find space. Most of it appears to be organically grown. The practice has grown from growing a few vegetables for a family's own consumption to selling the stuff in local markets. Most of these urban farmers make little money doing it, and many don't do it for the money, but some make 6 figures.

Man is a creative and adaptive species!

Morning Reading

David Brooks has a good column on the demographic divide within the Democrat party. In short, educated voters are going for Obama while uneducated voters are going for Hillary. Can either candidate unite these groups of voters who, having relatively little hostility to each other, live in different worlds?

Really good article about current U.S. farm policy and its contradictions.

There is a great cartoon over at Econ Journal Watch. It is on the left hand side of the page. It makes a good point about externalities and property rights.

A study from the state of Washington found no evidence of illegal gas price manipulation. Add that study to the pile of others that have come to same conclusion. When will they stop?

Spencer Heath MacCallum

I've recently discovered the work of MacCallum. It is extremely thought provoking. His primary work focuses on the idea of "entrepreneurial communities" as an alternative to subdivisions. Examples of entrecoms or multiple tenant income property (MTIP), as he calls them, include shopping malls and hotels, where a given space is bought or leased while the common areas (walk ways, etc.) and the land itself remain under the ownership and control of a developer. As it applies to housing developments, the basic idea is that you own the house, but someone else owns the land under the house. The home owner pays land rent which then finances streets, parks, and other common areas. According to MacCallum, the entrepreneur who owns the development has much better incentives and feedback mechanisms to manage the development, including the common areas, successfully than does a home owner's association or city planner, both of which rely on democratic decision making.

MacCallum contributes a chapter to The Voluntary City. Here are portions of a great paragraph which addresses voting (very relevant during this election year) from his essay "The Case for Land Lease versus Subdivision" in that volume:

"Voting, widely held to be democratic, serves as the great legitimizer of the political process. But the fact is that like the political process itself, it is a makeshift, like a coin toss, that people fall back upon in the absence of any better alternative... Jonathon Swift supposedly quipped that 'some people have no better idea of determining right from wrong than by counting noses.' Voting is not a procedure for discovering truth or for making informed decisions. It is an agreed-upon method for people to gang up on one another without overt violence... Instead of navigating toward a win-win situation, voting is a method of breaking resistance to a course of action while ignoring the differences underlying the resistance. Its zero-sum nature is starkly dramatized in that wonderful vignette, attributed to Mencken, of two wolves and a lamb voting on the question of what to have for dinner."

Here is one article of MaCallum's and here is another. About half way through both he begins to discuss entrecoms or MTIPs.

So maybe we would be better off if we owned our homes, but not the ground under them.