Shoes and economics

岑嵘(Hangzhou)

The American drama "Sex and the City" said, "Women can see the whole world while standing on high-heeled shoes, and they look like they have the whole world when they pack new bags." High-heeled shoes are so important to women, and it is also valuable to economic researchers because they believe that from high-heeled shoes they can also see the direction of the future economy.

“The height of fashion: the history of high heels,” says Sehemik, “The height of the heel has increased significantly during the Great Depression of the 1930s, the oil crisis of the 1970s, and the cyber bubble of 2000.” It was found that when the economy is in recession, women need to buy higher heels because they want to be more prominent and special in the crowd.

The IBM Global Business Consulting Company in the United States recently released a new survey: The trend of women's heels is now turning from high to low. The heel height of mainstream women's shoes has gradually declined, from an average of 7 inches in 2009, to 5 inches in 2010, and then to 2 inches in the present, back to the level before the financial tsunami. Therefore, analysts believe that this is a good sign for the US economic recovery.

Taiwanese economists have also discovered the laws of shoes and the stock market. The shoes commonly used by women in Taiwan can be roughly divided into two types: one is a shoe that covers the toes and heels, usually worn by office workers, and the other is a pair of casual shoes that expose toes and heels. These shoes are easy to wear. Run and jump, women who don't need to appear outside or work to make money, like to wear this kind of shoes, so they are called "small wife shoes." Those economists found that once women wear “small wife shoes” on the street more than women who wear “worker shoes,” the stock market usually has a market; once the “work shoes” become mainstream, the recessionary market will not last. far.

In Sweden, there has been a bizarre incident involving shoes. Some shoe store shoes (single bags) are often stolen. This is a problem that makes shoe store owners puzzled. Is it Treasure Island? "One-legged pirate on dry?" What is the use of stealing a shoe? Finally, the police found the answer, the original Swedish shoe store used to display the left shoe, and their neighboring country, Denmark, is used to display right shoe, the two countries to steal one, they made up a pair.

In fact, this is a problem of information economics, where shoe-stealing people profit because they have more information. In 1970, three American economists, Stiglitz and others proposed "asymmetric information", which means that under the conditions of market economy, because of the asymmetry of information, the information owner will inevitably lead the information owner to seek for their own interests. One party is damaged. The three economists also won the Nobel Prize in economics for this theory.

The last story comes from Mahatma Gandhi. When Gandhi traveled by train, he accidentally left a shoe outside the train carriage. At that time, the train had already started. It was impossible to jump off the car to pick up the shoes. Gandhi immediately dropped the other shoe and said, "This way, people who have picked up their shoes can wear a pair of shoes."

This involves an economic "Pareto optimal" problem. Suppose we separate a pair of shoes and allocate it to two consumers, A and B. Then, they are just useless waste for these two consumers. Therefore, when Gandhi tossed his shoes out of the window, although he did not benefit him personally, he increased the overall interest of the entire society and realized the optimal allocation of resources.