Month: February 2004

Since last spring, the company has been selling fine art, including limited-edition lithographs by Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall and Joan Miró.

Greg Moors, an art dealer in San Francisco, began selling art at some of the company’s stores in brief experiments last spring, and for the last two months has been selling on the company’s Web site, Costco.com. The artwork is museum quality, matted and framed.

“There were so many double takes at the stores,” Mr. Moors said. “People stopped in front of these lithographs and said: ‘Wow! What is this?’ “

Mr. Moors sold 43 pieces of art during appearances at Costco stores – in the La Jolla area of San Diego, as well as Concord and Mountain View, Calif., and Issaquah, Wash. “I consistently did fairly well,” he said, “considering that people are coming in to buy hamburger and walking out with a $1,200 work of art.”

Get this:

Ms. Elsner said Costco applied the same pricing system to the art that it did to other goods, marking them up no more than 14 percent above what it pays Mr. Moors. He said his markup was “way below what retail galleries charge” but declined to be specific.

Tony Pernicone, an art appraiser who owns Avanti Fine Arts, a gallery in Larkspur, Calif., north of San Francisco, and previously directed the San Francisco Art Exchange and other art galleries, said: “At a legitimate gallery, generally the markup is 100 to 150 percent, depending on their overhead and the cost of the art. Obviously, you get galleries that try to go higher.” Costco’s price of $1,550 for a Chagall Bible Series lithograph was $500 to $1,000 less than a gallery would have charged, Mr. Pernicone said.

In other words, “non-dignified” intermediaries are entering the market and offering the goods at cheaper prices, thereby separating the artwork from the attached aura of the sale. Let’s root for the artwork, not the aura. Here is the story. Here is the web site, note they are temporarily out of stock. Here is the sort of work you can buy, albeit from another seller.

Lynne Kiesling says it all, with some side comments on outsourcing.

The Financial Times surveys the research of Steve Levitt on sports. Here is one succint passage:

In Europe, Levitt is feted as one of the authors of the “penalty-kick paper”. Probably only a trio of economists would have watched videos of 459 penalties taken in the French and Italian football leagues. The authors were testing a complex point of game theory. What they found was that the best place to put a penalty was the middle of the goal, largely because goalkeepers always dive. Yet few penalty-takers actually choose the middle. “I think one reason people don’t is that it’s just incredibly humiliating to a kicker if he kicks in the middle and doesn’t score,” guesses Levitt.

How about Levitt on Michael Lewis’s Moneyball?

There has been much hype recently about baseball clubs finding statistics to identify good players. Levitt read Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball about the supposed innovators, the Oakland As, and is unimpressed. “If you look at all the stats they say are so important, the As are totally average! There’s very little evidence Billy Beane [the club’s general manager] is doing something right.”

My recollection is that Lewis claims the small-market A’s put together a good team more cheaply, not that they win every pennant. In fairness to Levitt, a scrupulous researcher, perhaps this quotation is pulled out of context.

Thanks to J. Charles Bradbury for the pointer, check out his blog.

In Indiana, Governor Joe Kernan canceled a $15.2 million dollar contract with a subsidiary of a Bombay headquartered company. The next lowest bid was $8.2 million dollars higher. Even if we accept (incorrectly!) the notion that trade restrictions create jobs the governor’s action will at best create some 50 jobs at an additional cost to Indiana taxpayers of $162,000 per job. Consider, both Indiana taxpayers and workers would be better off if the state government hired the Indians and gave 50 randomly chosen workers $100,000 to spend at their leisure.

See Stuart Anderson’s review of state legislation against outsourcing for more examples of Mercantilism in action.

Have you ever been to Trinidad? The steel bands (“pans”) start practicing sometime before Christmas, and the pan competitions peak at the time of Carnival, which we call Mardi Gras. Serious pan music is otherwise hard to find on the island, although we do see many smaller performances for tourists throughout the year.

We find a similar pattern in Brazil. The production of samba culture has an especially pronounced seasonal business cycle, again centered around carnival.

Carnival culture appears to have started for religious and cultural reasons, yet it persists more in some places rather than others. Why bunch your cultural production so tightly into one part of the year?

Carnival culture may prove efficient when a large number of the customers are tourists, who journey from other countries, or other regions, to an urban center. A high fixed cost of the journey implies it is better to bunch cultural production at one time of the year, to lower transport costs.

The significant presence of amateurs in production also encourages carnival culture. It is widely understood in Trinidad that many workers will take off extra time to practice the pans. The relevant time of year is an accepted social convention, plus everyone takes off at the same time, so the pan orchestras can practice together. After carnival, everyone is expected to go back to work at the regular pace.

The use of national competitions to market performers also increases the efficiency of carnival culture. When everyone competes at the same time, on a set of common stages, it is easier to declare a “winner,” and indeed carnival cultures usually emphasize such competitions and hand out national or regional prizes. The prospect of being a winner is then used to drum up local corporate support. If a company backs a carnival winner, it receives significant favorable publicity.

So enjoy your Mardi Gras today!

By the way, classical music has survived as a truly popular music only in Trinidad and Tobago, largely because it is played on the steel pans at Carnival competitions.

Imagine a future where India has billions of people, they are all as productive as American workers, and they all will work for a penny a year (forget the possible contradiction between the last two assumptions).

Or imagine a nanotechnology machine that can produce the world’s output, and then some, for a nickel. If you wish, take this one step further. The machine produces robots, which compete with human labor, and cost only a penny a year to maintain.

The economics of outsourcing resemble the economics of technical change. Advanced robots would put many people out of work, just as computers have eliminated many jobs. Yet few people complain about this scenario, it is somehow emotionally more resonant to complain about “foreigners taking jobs” than to complain about “machines taking jobs.” Of course the empirical reality is that technology takes away (and also creates) many more jobs than do foreigners.

Now I am not going to give you the line “in the long run robots would create more jobs than they destroy.” For most plausible parameter values that is in fact true. But let us say that robots, or foreigners, could produce all of our current output for a mere nickel. Total wages, of course, could not exceed a nickel in such a scenario. Since this is below subsistence, no one would work for money (some wealthy capitalists might still work for fun).

If you are truly worried about outsourcing, you must have in mind something in this direction, albeit with less extreme parameter values. But as a perverse kind of reality check, consider the extreme case, how bad would it be?

National income would be enormous, the catch is that virtually all of it would go to capital. But capital is very very cheap. You need only save a nickel to command the equivalent of today’s global output. How many poor Americans today cannot save a nickel?

If you fear radical outsourcing you also should favor privatization of social security, with investment of the funds in the stock market. (Personally I am skeptical of the idea, but I don’t fear radical outsourcing either.) This would make us all very very wealthy.

Furthermore you should buy stocks immediately. If you are not devoting your portfolio to stocks, as rapidly as possible, and you fear radical outsourcing, you probably hold inconsistent views.

And of course you shouldn’t criticize the fiscal policies of the Bush administration, or call for a tax increase, if you think the stock market will skyrocket in this fashion.

Now I don’t ever expect to see parameter values so extreme. But neither do I expect that outsourcing will lead to a net destruction of jobs. The worrywarts wish to have it both ways. Outsourcing will be so significant as to take away American jobs, but not so significant to bring large benefits through the ownership of capital.

Link added: For this post I am indebted to conversations with Robin Hanson, and his paper on a robot economy.