Alternate Title: The Economics of Being Fat
I was sitting on the metro yesterday, resting my head against the window while dreaming of eating French Silk pie, when I suddenly felt myself crushed up against the wall of the car. A tremoundously fat, sweaty 30-something year old man has decided to sit next to me, and his girth was infringing on my space.
In economics, this is called a spillover effect. A spillover effect occurs when a company, in producing a product, creates some effect on society as a whole that it not included in the company's cost. For example, a factory spills waste into the river, thus decreasing the quality of the water. The true cost of the factory's output is greater than the cost the factory pays if they don't clean up the water. This is also called an "externality."
Anyways, this man had spilled over into my space, space that I had paid for. His ticket and my ticket cost the same, but he was infringing on my comfort and my ride. The true cost of his metro ride is higher than mine, yet we pay the same price.
The metro should take the same stance that airplanes take, wherein if you are too fat to sit in one seat, you need to pay for two. Some may call this cruel, but really it is simple economics. We force companies who pollute to clean up after themselves. Why shouldn't we force fat people to pay more money for taking up more space? This would also probably encourage people to lose weight and society would gain as a whole. This, gentle (soft "g") reader, is how to turn a negative externality into a positve externality.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
You raise interesting points about fat people.
Incidentally, I am currently researching a thesis that fat people are angrier than regularly-sized people. The thesis, if uncontroversial, would work to explain unreasonable police aggression.
I had two other alternate titles for this post:
"My body is a wonderland. Your Body is a negative externality."
"This Post is not for Eating, You Fat Bastard."
I like the last alternate title the best. I propose changing grocery prices using an exponential price discrimination function that factors in body fat percentage and the caloric value of the food being purchased. This would SEVERELY limit obese people's ability to consume all the marginal food items that add so enormously to their weight and would provide a correlated revenue source to pay for the exponential increase in costs in medicine, extra train seats, and, of course, the demand for enormous swaths of textiles.
Wow, a progressive fat tax. Now we are talking. It would probably cut down on obesity in poor areas, thus decreaing the state health care burden. This is quite the idea, indeed. Only the rich will be able to afford being morbidly obese. I don't do this often but "THIS IS GENIUS!!"
Post a Comment