Is Christmas Efficient? (2013)

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/12/are-seasonal-business-cycles-inefficient.html

by arcdefoo • 2 years ago

43 30 2 years ago

marginalrevolution.com

paulryanrogers• 2 years ago

Interesting question but how would you prove any of it without a lot of natural experiments?

Animats• 2 years ago

By adding a new gifting holiday in midsummer, for load-balancing. It's called "Amazon Prime Day".

praptak• 2 years ago

It might get tricky. Midsummer already has a spending stimulus. Summer vacation is when people spend their money on tourism.

Sparkyte3• 2 years ago

Good article.

I feel like it was more efficient in the past before Amazon. Now everyone buys online, you buy from Amazon sometimes you don't realize the product you just puchased wasn't even from Amazon but a third party seller. The product sometimes fake.

The dependency on the 4th quarter is just dumb.

cma3• 2 years ago

Delivery is a lot more efficient than each person driving to the store.

graemep4• 2 years ago

Is that always true? Definitely if you are buying things from one place, but what if I drive a few km into town (in a hatchback), buy multiple things from multiple shops and drive back, how does that compare to getting multiple deliveries made by much larger vehicles?

Then there is that far greater amount of packing used for deliveries. The box you would find in the shop is packaged inside another box, often much larger. Then there is the far higher rate of returns.

IT may be true, buts its not obvious to me that it is.

namaria• 2 years ago

Hey I'd forgotten about Marginal Revolution! I used to follow this blog several years ago, thanks for the reminder!

AlexCornila• 2 years ago

we are over saturated with economic thinking ..at this point when I hear efficiency or competitiveness a suddenly have an uncontrollable reflex of throwing up

eMPee584• 2 years ago

how about transitioning to a non-commercial, cooperative "resource-based" economy then? we could need some help..

tmtvl• 2 years ago

Healthy employees do better work than unhealthy ones and happiness is a key component of mental health. Hence efficiency improves when employees have better working conditions.

niam• 2 years ago

I get the hatred of excesses wrt finance/economics, to a point. Though I can't help but see comments against efficiency in general as a shift in the needle towards policymakers who bask in nimwittitude.

We're not over saturated with it, because in another universe: paper currency failed the vibe check because not-thinking-about-stuff was en vogue. I'm glad we live in this one.

markovs_gun• 2 years ago

That legit happened a few times in history until it stuck. Paper currency was invented and abandoned many times in history so we sort of do live in the timeline where it failed the vibe check, it's just such a good idea people kept trying it afterwards.

tempodox• 2 years ago

nimwittitude

Is that the intellectual level of a witling?

dudeinjapan• 2 years ago

The real question is: "Is Santa (thermodynamically) efficient?" https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~andrew5/cute/engineer_santa.txt

amelius4• 2 years ago

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Inertial_damping_system

11235813213455• 2 years ago

In terms of pollution/environment? probably not efficient

Is Christmas Efficient? (2013)

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