In Palermo I saw a parade go by the major street and I saw that many people were watching. I asked myself the obvious Hansonian question: who watches a parade?
A naive economic account might postulate that low income earners, namely those with low opportunity cost — are those who watch a parade. Yet this was not my sense watching the watchers in Palermo. And hey I was watching the parade and in Sicilian terms I'm relatively well off. (Alternatively, was anyone watching "the parade" at all?)
The "signaling revolution" in economics can subvert established tradition. For instance it overturns some notions of the relevance of opportunity cost. People with low opportunity costs are often the same people with low expected benefits from signaling. So how much does the opportunity cost concept really explain?
I also file Sicily, or at least Palermo, under the heading of: "regions where the poor women are at least as beautiful as the wealthy women." Why is this sometimes true? (And does this question about investment in beauty have the same logical structure as the one about the parade?) It does not, in general, hold for the United States or for that matter Sweden, my current locale.
In Palermo I also saw an ugly young man, but he was very macho, haughty, and full of swagger. He was with a very beautiful young woman. He was wearing a designer T-shirt — presumably sold to thousands — with the single word "Rebel" emblazoned just below the neck. She gazed at him admiringly.
What did you sense, while watching the watchers in Palermo?
From my past experience the people watching a parade at any given point are often not the same people watching the parade a few minutes later. For many parades the crowd is often transient – a human traffic jam caused by the diversion of walkways and distracted pedestrians and mushrooming of hawkers and panhandlers. The people leaning across the barricades to take photos tend to stay where they are, but those form a small fraction of the apparent mass of people. In a sense, a possible answer is that relatively few are actually there to watch the parade per se; it’s just something to do while stuck in (human) traffic.
That was probably Antonio Cassano.
Do you seriously think it was the T-shirt?
You might be overvaluing the fashion component of signaling.
Doesn’t opportunity cost also depend on the shape of the utility function at low consumption levels? Sure, the poor may not lose much in money wages relative to the rich, but not being productive at the time the parade goes on might mean the poor don’t eat. For the rich (who may have more flexibility in their work) attending the parade may just mean working late a couple of evenings, or coming in on Saturday. Daniel Hamermesh has a related idea on why he cooks dinner at Freakonomics.
People who haven’t seen many parades?
Mulp, the lefty idea that people should pay for wars even if the wars are wrong is intriguing to me.
roswitha – nice one.
Ugly guy was probably rich.
We go with our little kids to local parades.
Income isn’t necessarily related to how a man spends his time. I suppose Bill Gates earned a billion dollars last year and might earn a billion next year, even if he spends the entire year watching parades. He could die on Jan. 1, and his estate could earn the billion. Beyond some margin, his income is unrelated to his employment.
“I also file Sicily, or at least Palermo, under the heading of: “regions where the poor women are at least as beautiful as the wealthy women.” Why is this sometimes true? (And does this question about investment in beauty have the same logical structure as the one about the parade?) It does not, in general, hold for the United States or for that matter Sweden, my current locale.”
I think there are a few explanations for this. One is that poorer, more traditional regions like Sicily employ heavily clan-based social organization, and individuals are not very free economically in relation to the clan (which is to say that their economic fates are more tied), which means, given the degree of non-predictability of beauty occurring in families, that the economic sorting of beauty, and the subsequent sorting in terms of procreation, that in Sicily’s case beauty remains uncorrelated to income and wealth.
My wife loves parades because of the nostalgia – she loved them as a kid and she gets to be a kid again. And they throw candy!
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