The war between Nestle and Starbucks over the instant coffee market

This is going to be short, because I am tired, but I keep noticing the hilariously aggressive ads that Nestle is putting up all over town targeted at Starbucks and their new line of instant coffee, Via.

So (for context) we first have the Via ads, which claimed that it's not just instant coffee, it's flowery-font instant.

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And therefore that Via (the flowery-font instant) is a whole new thing Starbucks has invented--an innovation.

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So then Nestle, which probably controls a good deal of the world wide instant coffee market with Nescafe (which was, by the way, first introduce in 1938. Ok, here's some info on their "soluble coffee" market control throughout the world.) releases this torrent of ads in response to Via, the resentful-ness of which, for some reason, strikes me as totally hilarious. See below.

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Or my personal favorite (can't find a pic) which I saw whilst biking home today which read (something like):

"Dear Starbucks:

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Raising our prices by 400% not so much."

It took me a little while to process this (wait, so you are saying that raising a price is not a form of flattery?...wait...?)

Anyway, I guess we'll see if Nestle's campaign pays off or not. Who drinks instant coffee anyway?

Iranian Elections--Rigged?

So incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was pronouced the winner of the Iranian presidential elections tonight and some claim that the elections were rigged (and reformist challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi actually won). For example, in this article (entitled "Iran's Stolen Election") from the New Yorker, Laura Secor writes:

"There can be no question that the June 12, 2009 Iranian presidential election was stolen. Dissident employees of the Interior Ministry, which is under the control of President Ahmadinejad and is responsible for the mechanics of the polling and counting of votes, have reportedly issued an open letter saying as much. Government polls (one conducted by the Revolutionary Guards, the other by the state broadcasting company) that were leaked to the campaigns allegedly showed ten- to twenty-point leads for Mousavi a week before the election; earlier polls had them neck and neck, with Mousavi leading by one per cent, and Karroubi just behind."

This picture, from Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic shows statistical evidence of the fraud.

Sigh.

Politicians make a lot of promises

Assorted news on the progress of "Change" promised by the current administration:

On government transparency:
CIA Stance On Torture Tape Docs Suggests Obama's New Open Government Era Won't Materialize
CIA Urges Judge To Keep Bush-Era Documents Sealed

On reducing excesses/inequality:
Is the Obama Administration Getting Serious About Executive Compensation? (No.)

On regulation of the financial markets: Financial Overhaul Raises Questions

Although the final article is from a week ago and mostly speculative (the White House is releasing their official plan for financial regulatory reform next week), I have heard from Ben Bernanke (who came to the Fed this morning to speak) that soon-to-be-released plans are a heavily pared down version of the administrations original ideas for such reform and do not amount to any substantive change. Bernanke said that the White House is apparently passing the buck to Congress to come up with such regulations, but he noted that Congress is "usually inertial" and probably won't be able to enact any serious reforms either. He sounded disappointed.

Revision: don't forget about this (on reproductive freedoms).

In which Incentive-Driven Behavior is displayed

Well, this is not a surprise.


Update: another perspective from the medical profession

In which my admiration for Brad DeLong increases significantly

I've been linked to Brad Delong's blog a couple of times (DeLong is a professor of economics at Berkeley who focuses on macro and political economy) but I never really took the time to explore the blog until today. My conclusion: Brad Delong is awesome.

I particularly enjoyed his participation in the lambasting of Ross Douthat's annoying column in the NYT today:

This, however, really made me fall in love.

Sigh..

Anti-Abortion Group to Buy Tiller's Clinic?

Well, that's depressing/could suggest to some that violence is a viable way to defeat the pro-choice movement, but I really doubt the family would sell it to a group that has clearly advocated violence against abortion providers in the past...

H/T: David

The Deficit

The NYT's "Economic Scene" has this article today by David Leonhardt on the ballooning government deficit. The article warns about the ramifications of the trillion dollar deficits projected by the Congressional Budget Office, saying "This debt will constrain the country’s choices for years and could end up doing serious economic damage if foreign lenders become unwilling to finance it." The article goes on to attribute most of the deficit to Bush policies (tax cuts, the war, etc.) and the business cycle (i.e. the recession) but adds that "Mr. Obama does not have a realistic plan for eliminating the deficit, despite what his advisers have suggested." It points out that Obama's continuation of some of Bush's policies and reliance on reducing the deficit through health care reform (the effects of which won't be seen for a while) rather than through significant tax increases will create a bigger deficit in coming years than the Obama team is promising.

Brad DeLong from UC Berkeley has some thoughts about the article: A Pretty Good but Not Excellent Story from David Leonhardt on the Deficit. His biggest concern is that "David doesn't say what part of the $1.2 trillion deficit is a problem," pointing out that the US can realistically expect to run about a $500 billion deficit with no major ramifications, plus an additional $400 billion due to recessionary strain, meaning that the remaining $300 billion is the problematic part of the deficit.

Yoga and Meditation

The purpose of this post is to extol the virtues of yoga and meditation, especially as antidotes to stress.

I get stressed easily. I worry a lot. Anyone who knows me will attest to this. At some point this year, as the signs of the strain on me that the stressful graduate school application process created were showing, a mentor pulled me aside to talk to me about stress management. This person talked to me about how stress can impact performance in school, at jobs, and in one's personal life. This person spoke from experience and advised me to try out meditation and yoga.

I feel that this person's actions were brave and befitting of an excellent mentor. I decided to try out their advice.

Now I have been practicing yoga and meditation once a week and it has made a large impact on my stress management abilities! They have taught me how to find calm in stressful situations (5 PM blue line, anyone?). These articles from the Mayo Clinic and WebMD (one of which recommends yoga and meditation 3x a week) lay out the incredible health benefits (mental and physical) that yoga and meditation can have.

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/meditation/HQ01070
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/meditation/MM00623


http://www.webmd.com/heart-disease/news/20041108/yoga-gets-hearts-healthy
http://www.webmd.com/heart-disease/news/20050304/meditation-may-soothe-stressed-hearts
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/yoga/CM00004

Unemployment Rates by Education

I was talking with my roommate (who is looking for a job) about the average chances of finding employment for a person who is demographically like her. I know, roughly, the breakdown by race and gender from the BLS report I mentioned below, but we wondered about the breakdown by education.

I found this graph on Calculated Risk via a post on Matthew Yglesias' blog (click on it to see a larger version).

This graph shows unemployment rates since 1992 for the 25 and over lot by education.

The conclusion to be drawn here is that while unemployment is currently high for all education levels, it is much higher (and has risen much more over the past year) for those with lower levels of education. For example, those in the labor force with less than a high school diploma (16% of whom are unemployed, up from 9% in January '09) or a high school diploma only (10% of whom are unemployed, up from 5% in January '09) face very difficult conditions.

Yglesias points out that "mass unemployment is really not a crisis-level issue among those with bachelor’s degrees." BA holders face a 4.8% rate of unemployment (up from 4% in January '09). This rate is, in fact, around national level of unemployment in the pre-recession economy.

Working Bikes Co-op

Yesterday I went to Working Bikes Co-op to buy a new road bike.

A few words on Working Bikes: Working Bikes is a non-profit which acquires bikes through donation or from "the waste stream" (their words, I assume this means scrap yards, garbage heaps, etc.) and fixes them up to be sold or donated to local and international charity organizations. Each year, they give away over 5,000 bikes. Their website points out that bikes can make a huge difference in terms of employment opportunities in the developing world.


What I found particularly interesting when I went on Saturday is their business model, which I will attempt to sketch below.

They have only one paid employee and the rest of their staff consists of volunteers.

They are only open 3 days a week from 12-5.

The bikes are sold for less than they would sell for on Craigslist (the staff claimed the bikes are "1/2 Craigslist prices" but I felt like they were a little higher than that) and they offer a 30 day return policy (so, in addition to standard tune-up they perform on each bike, there's some quality control).

The outcome? Demand for their bikes is cray-zay high. Having been warned about this by friends, I got to the store 30 minutes before opening. There were already 20 people ahead of me. Within 30 minutes of opening the store, almost every single bike was snatched up (I'd estimate that there were about 50 bikes). I found a brown Schwinn road bike with (mostly) working gears and brakes (and not much else to speak of) and bought it for $75.

That's a good price but not such a steal (in my opinion) that warrants the kind of buying frenzy I witnessed in the store. Customers were rushing around to check out all of the bikes as soon as the doors opened, and I got the the feeling that one should secure a bike quickly or someone else would snatch it. Within 10 minutes there was a long line at the cash register. Were customers really alotting enough time to make sure they wanted/knew what they were purchasing? Some mixed reviews on yelp and my own anecdotal evidence (a friend told me he recently spent $75--exactly how much his bike cost--on repairs) suggest maybe not.

I pondered, as I rode home, the connection between consumption and competition. A college friend once told me that she had read a study (which I unfortunately can not find on the web) which showed that a person who is presented with certain amount of food will choose to eat more if there are many people sharing the food than if they are eating alone. Are we induced to buy more than we need when we feel like we are competing with other customers over a limited number of items?

I wondered if the bicycle purchase outcomes would have been different if each Working Bikes customer had leisurely walked into the store when there were only a few other customers there.

Then again, maybe the buying frenzy was just a rational response to the fact that Working Bikes has "the cheapest bikes in the city" (as a friend put it).

Student Performance and Instructor Gender

Slate has an article summarizing the research of UC Davis Professors Scott Carrell and Marianne Page on the effects of instructor gender on student performance. Using data from science and math classes at the Air Force Academy, they find that replacing a male instructor with a female instructor nearly erases the gender gap in performance (and completely erases it among a select set of "high ability" students). Certain methodological difficulties which arise in such comparison studies, such as accounting for differences in syllabi and exam content between male and female teachers, are mitigated by the fact that course materials are uniform across Air Force Academy classes. The authors are also able to account for student ability, as they have access to the student's SAT scores.

Fascinating!

The Employment Report

The BLS released their monthly employment report today, summarizing the employment situation in May 2009.

As has been the case since January 2008, non-farm employment decreased over the past month. The employment decrease (354k), however, was far less steep than it has been for the past few months and the lowest decrease since September 2008.

The unemployment rate, on the other hand, increased slightly more than it has during the past few months to 9.4, the highest unemployment rate in 26 years.

The fact that we see substantial increases in the unemployment rate yet moderate job losses reflects the fact that a large number of people joined the workforce (i.e. started actively looking work) over the past month. This may reflect the fact that more and more households are facing credit constraints.


For more information/opinions/analyses, look here, here, here and here.

A couple of quick notes I thought were worth pointing out:

1) Sectors which shed the most jobs include construction, manufacturing, and professional and business services, whereas education and health services saw an increase. As the NYT article above points out, the manufacturing situation will undoubtedly only get more dreary in the coming months with GM falling apart.

2) Regional variation in unemployment rates is high.

yay for Farmer's Best Market!

A commendable new supermarket is bringing fresh food to Chicago's South Side, where large "food deserts" (places with few or no grocery stores) coincide with some of the highest rates of obesity in the city, as summarized in this report. Let's hope it it is able to stay open after operating at a loss during it's first few months of operation.


(H/T: Gaper's Block)

Skepticism about Biking in NYC

Hm. Well, I guess this is one way to encourage biking in NYC. I'm already missing Mayor Daley's unbridled love/support for us bikers.

Homicides in Chicago

I was reading the Red Eye this morning on the subway on the way to work (as usual) and happened upon the homicide tracker. I was saddened to read that there were 49 homicides in May (including 5 on one day) in Chicago.

The Red Eye noted that trends in the type of homicide, perpetrator, and motive continue from previous years, adding:
"Eighty percent of the...murders in 2008 involved a shooting and 229 murders stemmed from street gang strife or narcotics...The typical murder victim was black, male, between 17 and 25 years old and had a prior arrest history."

The violence also continues to be concentrated in the southern and western parts of the city.

Statistics collected by the Chicago Police Department on Chicago murders from 1991-2008 show that the annual murder rate--after being the highest in the nation in 2003 at 601--dropped just below 500/year for the years 2004-2007 but climbed back to 511 in 2008.

The large drop in 2004 has been partially attributed to the CPD's adoption of strategies, based on the NYPD's Compstat system, which saturates high crime areas with officers and surveillence cameras while also trying to counteract the cause of the violence.

Civilian groups have played a part in reducing homicides in recent year. CeaseFire, for example, works directly with former and current gang members to help decrease violence, while The Safer Foundation works to help ex-convicts find employment in order to keep them off the streets.

So far, there is hope that the 15% increase in homicides from 2007 to 2008 (which is not significant, according the CPD report) will not continue in 2009, as the total thus far (158) for January through June in 2009 is lower than last year (179).

Just some facts on trends in Chicago homicides, without too much analysis.

Hello World

I am creating this blog as a collection of my thoughts on economics, public policy, feminism, goings on in my life...etc. As of late, I have been posting links to news stories or analyses (alongside my own comments or discussions) on facebook several times a day. These links (lately) have pertained to the Sotomayor nomination, the murder of George Tiller, the employment crisis, and social safety net in the US. I felt that a blog would be a more appropriate medium for these posts, as I could expand upon and clarify my thoughts on each one. Also, friends of mine might stop blocking me from their facebook newsfeed (Adam). :)

Thanks for reading!