Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

You know, some days you just plain scare me.......
Us true coffee drinks have long recognized that 20 ounce mugs are but thimbles. I'm waiting for the day they truly invent the bottomless mug.

Marty Eichenbaum always had one of those silver thermoses that he'd drink out of while doing lectures. By the end of the lecture he'd be writing on transparencies (very jittery handwriting) and pulling them off the projector just as quickly. The undergrads would have to yell to get him to pause long enough for them to copy down what he'd written.

Those things are difficult to clean though.

I remember reading about a study relating overeating and portion size, where one experiment involved giving people bowls of soup that were secretly being refilled from the bottom. Oh, how I wished for a coffee mug on the same model...

O god! It's income and substitution effect and Slutsky's equation again! Well I'll stop here and not excoriate that infamous 1960's econ professor at Berkeley any more! (This is too much of an inside joke. The ultimate inside joke, since I'm probably the only person that understands it).

But is it too late to change my grade?

Mmmmmm...

octuple espressos...

"Is one now satiated?" No way. Some other guy will almost for sure sometime in the not too distant future own a mug that will make the one in question look less impressive. The fashion show goes on. The rat race goes on.

Because utility is relative, not absolute.

Brad, you mean that your utility function for mugs is quadratic?

Because utility is relative, not absolute.

Don't be absurd. Or do you believe that modern sewage systems, pennicilin, and refrigderation are only relative?

I can point at specific (though minor) problems in my life, in the past, that have been solved by the application of a bigger cup or bowl. I didn't want the cup or bowl because Mr. Jones had one; I wanted one because I had a problem and I thought to myself, 'Self, the ideal solution to this lack of utility would be a bigger mug.'.

bubbles are caused by the bigger mug problem.

well, I had to try to bring in some economics.

Self-awareness of one's own satiation level is an enlightened state to which I surely aspire. Why, just the other day I was visiting a local estate auction, at which a number of collectible John Wayne plates were being were being sold to a lively audience. I had the opportunity to ask the bidders why they were bidding on the plates.

Bah. The unenlightened fools had no notion of these fine objects' utility whatsoever. When I interviewed them, to a woman (they were for some reason all women bidding) they refused to acknowledge the practical benefits of owning and using them -- indeed, when pressed they lied and insisted that they would never consider eating off them, or even washing them, and also refused to admit that they were treating them as a form of long-term investment! Instead, they offered the most trivial-sounding and meandering reasons for their bids of $100 and more per plate: "they're nice", "I don't have this one" and "it's a hobby" being the memorable ones. One even said she didn't display them at all, but rather kept them inn the boxes in her attic, and would pass them along to her children in that state.

Such poppycock. I, on the other hand, what with my background and training, was better equipped for participation in the economic realities of our times, and therefore bought a very nice antique photo album (without any names or captions), a box of old cigar box labels, and a shiny art pottery vase.

Yours in theory,
Tozier

Increased utility?

Now just think of how many calculations you need to do in order to figure out how to spend it correctly.

"In fact, if I have so much as a penny to my name on the day I die, it will only be because I miscalculated my utility."

Brad,
Do your female colleagues obsess about mug size as well, or is it just a guy thing?

Your local Long's drug store sells one-liter insulated mugs.

It's a magic moment when you get a new demitasse set, isn't it?

Check spelling of Kirman. I have a cc mug a photo of which will be posted on my blog when someone tells me how to post photos on a blogspot blog.

Oops I mean to write that Elisabetta Addis and I own a 3500 cc = 123.2 ounces mug.

Sorry for three posts in a row, but Elisabetta Addis has just proposed (and I agree) to raise Brad's utility to a frighteningly high indifference curve by giving him the 3500 cc mug (but how will he get it back to Berkely in one pice ?)

TANSTAAFL. Heart attacks, anyone?

Does said mig fit in a Subaru Legacy's cupholders?

Cheap mug shots -

Beware of plastic mugs, unless you know (and don't mind) what they're releasing into your beverage when heated. There is no minimum daily requirement for bisphenol-A.

What fool has decreed that most oversized mugs shall be smaller on bottom than on top (i.e. top-heavy)? or maybe not fool, could be a cleaning service moonlighting in design.

"do you believe that modern sewage systems, pennicilin, and refrigderation are only relative?" Now that stuff is soon to be a century old. I mean that SUV's, and even cars where they are to many and the traffic system is failed (urban sprawl), and evidently all things where the brand name is more expensive than the product that bears them yields more relative than absolute utility. Plastic surgery. And clean clothes.

Clean clothes!? Well, if clean clothes yielded absolute utility, how come that girl's clothes have to be really clean, but boy's clothes are still sometimes OK if they're less clean? If the other parents' girls didn't have so perfectly clean clothes, I wouldn't spend so much time washing. (Would you!?).

OK, and cars!? They're mostly relative utility even where there are broad enough roads to carry them all. The neigbor's wife drives a small few 1000 dollars car that is always more than full of kids, bags from the supermarket etc. The neigbor drives a large many 10,000 dollar car carrying only him. Wouldn't they swap if the cars mainly yielded absolute utility? Would he drive such an expensive car if his colleagues didn't?

Luxuries - almost by definition. Salmon is nowadays here in Sweden considered good food (if caught in the wild). But our language still contains phrases that refers to how crappy it was considered to be in the old days when salmon was everyday food in some regions. Now it's expensive, so it has to be good.

No. Said mugs do not fit into the cupholders on a Subaru Legacy wagon.

Surely there is a mug for 7-Eleven's 64-ounce Double Gulp.

Perhaps mugs are indeed positional goods. Perhaps mug size in the covert determinant of SUV size. Perhaps our mugs will increase in size like the rivalrous evolution of peacock's tails, until we end up looking downright silly.

And perhaps, as Bill Wolman might observe, it's a mug's game.

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Ut desint vires, tamen est laudanda voluntas - Although the power is lacking, the will is commendable. (Ovid)

Aspirat primo Fortuna labori - Fortune smiles upon our first effort. (Virgil)

Una voce - With one voice, unanimously

Do ut des - I give so that you give back

O quam cito transit gloria mundi! - O how quickly passes the glory of the world!

Tempus edax rerum - Time is the devourer of things (time flies)

Alis volat propriis - He flies by his own wings