What Do Beer, Road Construction and Antitrust Have in Common?

You wouldn't think that that many legal concepts influence what happens when I allow cars to park on my lawn every football Saturday, but - as I hope I am at least beginning to convince you - laws and rules are everywhere and affect everything. So every Saturday, when I amble out to my driveway, set up a sign that says "Parking, EZ - OUT!" and stand there with a beer while people literally drive past me and hand me money, there are any number of systems of rules that are influencing what I do. Let's look at just a few.

Antitrust Law
No, seriously. I live at an intersection, and the owners on all four corners sell parking. And each week we yell or mosey across the street and fix our prices. It's almost always $20 (at least these days - it was less in the dark years when The Blue was awful), but it's still straight-up price fixing. It is, no doubt, a restraint of trade, which the Sherman Act expressly forbids.

I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this because the idea of a game day attendee suing the four of us under the Sherman Act is so patently ridiculous. But there are some actual legal issues that we could spend time discussing if we wanted. Is our agreement a contract? We exchange promises of a sort, that might serve as consideration. Is our commerce within Congress' power? I almost always get out of state license plates, there's a colorable argument it's "interstate." I'll stop, but hey - if you're a contracts or antitrust professor, food for thought for exam questions.

Of course, underlying all of this is what might be considered an economic "law:" supply and demand. The supply on my corner is fixed; we can only get so many cars on our lawns. But demand various on any number of axes. If Michigan sucks, demand goes down. The demand over a given period of time, at least, is different for 12:00 starts and 3:30 starts - they trickle in a lot more slowly for later games. And, as I'm learning all too concretely this year, demand varies a lot based on traffic patterns. Which brings us to:

Federal and State Bond Issues
The bridge between my house and The Big House

is under construction, as is a HUGE portion of the major road leading in from the east. These are paid for by bonds and state and federal expenditure, which are authorized by a complex set of laws. You would think this has little to do with my parking situation, but since the traffic patterns have created new bottlenecks away from my house and decreased the overall traffic on my side of town, these expenditures have made parking on my corner a lot less attractive. I assume that lawn owners on the other side of town and at the new bottlenecks have seen a substantial uptick in their traffic. Point is, infrastructural construction paid for an authorized pursuant to law have had a material effect on how parking is done around my house.


The Informal Norms of Residential Parkers
Yeah, this is a thing. My neighbors and I may all agree to a fixed $20 price at the start of the day, but it's understood that as game time approaches we can lower our prices with reprobation. What happens, you might ask, when one of us bucks the norm and decides to be a rational maximizer and undercut our neighbors? I don't know. No one has in the five years I've lived here. The norms of cooperation are pretty strong.

As are the norms that govern the parkers themselves. I never had to ask anyone to clean up, or to not grill, because the norms of parking - heck, of basic decency - meant that no one ever did something like fire up a grill without asking me first, and everyone always cleans up after themselves. And, as you might already have guessed, these aren't the only norms that influence how I go about my business on Saturdays.

The Rules of Partying
I throw a tailgate for friends on home game days pretty much without exception.

It would be weird for me to ask everyone over and then spend all day in the driveway, don't you think? There are certain expectations and rules of civility that come with hosting a party, and most Saturdays I have to make choices about when I can stay out on the driveway and usher cars in, and when I need - ok, "get" - to go back and have BBQ and some beers with my friends. It doesn't cause problems most of the time, but it's another set of etiquette considerations that play into what I do on Saturdays.

I could probably get more detailed, but I think you get the point. It seems simple. I put on a hat and sunglasses, drag my sign out to the road, open a beer (are there rules about how close to the road I can take a visible alcohol container?), and wave cars onto my lawn while collecting their cash. It's the easiest money I've ever made. But lurking in the background behind even such a fun, seemingly simple thing, there are lots of laws and informal rules that impact how I go about my business. I don't think about them all the time - I do have to get out of bed in the morning - but there they are. Something to think about if you ever come tailgate with me.

Baseball's Change

It's cold this morning in Ann Arbor (well, cold for September), which means fall is on its way, which means football season is here, which means playoff baseball will be here soon! Next week, a longer post on the norms that organically emerge in the world of game day parking in my neighborhood, but since time today must be sacrificed to the dissertation and job application gods (they are jealous gods), a few quick wonderings about the fifth playoff time in baseball will do. 

For those of you who aren't fans baseball has two leagues, with three divisions each. Until this year, each division winner made the playoffs along with one team from each league with the next best record overall called a "wild card." This year, there is a second wild card team. The two wild card teams will play each other in a one-game playoff, with the winner advancing to a five game series against one of the division winners. 

Now, even under this new, marvelously accommodating system, my Boston Red Sox will not make the playoffs. 

$175 million doesn't buy what it used to. Also the Cubs aren't even close because don't EVER forget that God hates the Cubs.

In any event, my personal tendency in situations like this is to be skeptical of altering a traditional approach. Had I been older in 1994 when the wild card was added in the first place, I think I would have bemoaned the fact that we now had divisions, and multiple series, and not simply just two League Championship Series, and the World Series. But that ship having sailed, I actually think this new system might be an improvement.

What, ideally, are we trying to do with playoffs? Hopefully we achieve two compatible goals: 1) the system, more often than not, allows the best team the best chance of winning, and 2) fans are entertained by the process. The concern with adding in a fifth team is that it reduces the best teams overall chances of winning, and I agree that if it turns out that either the fourth of fifth team in ends up winning an unusual amount of the time, then the system isn't working like it should.

But here, I think the winner of the one-game playoff between wild card teams will put the winner at a pretty big disadvantage as it moves to the next series. Presumably the wild card teams will use their best available starting pitcher for the play-in game, which means he won't be able to pitch again until Game 4 or 5 of the next series, if there IS a Game 4 or 5. It's not a deal-breaker, but it's enough of a disadvantage that I suspect the wild card teams will win less often than they used to, and I think rewarding the division winners by doing this is OK. If you don't want to burn your best pitcher in a one game playoff? Well, you should have won the division.

So let's assume for the moment that the new system isn't actually worse at giving the best team the best shot at winning, and I actually think it might give that team an extra advantage compared to the old system. I don't think the second criteria is even debatable. This is going to be wildly entertaining. One game playoffs are awesome, after which I don't anticipate any drop-off in entertainment from the rest of the post-season. Furthermore, even more teams will be playing for that extra playoff spot, so the end of the regular season  may be more exciting too.

Mere excitement would not be a good enough reason to change the rules. There might be lots of things that would make a game more exciting but would either fundamentally change the parameters of a baseball game itself, or might not further the goal of having the best team rise to the top. BUT: here I think baseball has - perhaps despite itself - found a way to enhance excitement while still maintaining such a goal.

More broadly, it's of note that the way the rules guiding post-season play are (re) structured changes the strategy of teams involved: those who are still in the hunt may elect not to test young talent, but instead chase a playoff spot, teams in the one-game playoff may elect to use their best pitcher or not depending on circumstances. The change is comparatively minor, but it's good to be mindful of the knock-on effects of a rule change.

That's all for today. Happy September!

Bachelor Party!

What function, exactly, do we expect bachelor and bachelorette parties to accomplish? It should be enough, I would think, to have the bride- or groom-to-be say at the end "that was really fun," but it's not, is it? No, we need it to meet expectations. "Well, we had a great time. We made omelettes and crocheted sweaters for ducks." What? No.

We expect that the bachelor or bachelorette will debase themselves in some way, that they will become horribly, abysmally drunk, that the activities will hew to gendered stereotypes (sports games, steaks, poker, whatever it is women do at bachelorette parties), and that feeble gestures of the "so, are you ready to get married?" variety will be made towards the gravity of the situation.

I like traditions as much as the next guy - probably more than the next guy - but I wonder if we think much about their sources. We talk so much about "the last night of freedom" - thus the ubiquity of strip clubs at such things - but when you cast it as the French do it comes with a bit more bite. "Enterrement de vie de garçon/jeune fille;" "the burial of the life as a young man/woman." That's dark, don't you think? I recognize that it's often meant in fun or ironically, but I sometimes find the implication for our view of married life sad. Particularly when we consider the historical disparity between the sex lives of bachelors and the "virtue" demanded of their proper counterparts, thinking of these send offs as eulogies to our boisterous youth reifies unhelpful stereotypes of both sexuality and marriage.

OK. I don't mean to sound like the wet blanket killjoy who doesn't know how to have any fun. I'm not. But for me, traditions are best when the pageantry itself focuses our attention on the import of the moment. (Remember the point I made about the Tibetan moon festival? Like hell you do.) So if what we really want these parties to do is focus attention on what our friends' allegedly won't be able to do any more - which I don't think it is and certainly shouldn't be - then let's stick with the enterrement de vie de garçon. But what if we think of them instead celebrations of the friendship between the groom and his groomsmen (or bride and her bridesmaids) and the coming change in his (or her) life?

As far as our activities, this wouldn't change all that much. We would still go out drinking, to big dinners, to baseball games, etc. - though maybe not to strip clubs... hard to figure out how that would celebrate friendships or marriage... So my point - if I have one - isn't that we need to scrap the whole practice and start from scratch, but basically just to be more critical about what we're doing and why. Traditions are best when the practices they force us to enact serve as reminders to think about or remember something important. Thanksgiving, when done right, surrounds us with family and good food, and reminds us that we are lucky to have them. Dressing up for dinner, doing it more formally than we normally do, adding in the pageantry of preparing standard dishes, all serves as a ritualized reminder that we are lucky to have friends, and food, and family, and ought to give thanks. A bachelor(ette) party can do much the same thing; in fact it inevitably does. I just want us to be clearer on what it turns our minds to.

Books, Sunshine, Cards, and Nudity: Notes from the North

I'm fresh back from vacation (Yes, another one... what? Well, how is it my fault you aren't an academic?), this time a week on the northern shores of Lake Huron, away from it all with my father, brother and uncle. There we were, four men surrounded by water, miles by boat from the nearest other human, having with us only what we had brought.

It wasn't exactly the state of nature; I shouldn't get carried away. We had a roof over our heads - even if it's beginning to bow a little in the middle, and a kitchen with a stove and propane refrigerator. We even had running water and electricity the two hours a day or so we ran the generator. But for the most part, it was just us, separated from civilization.

But even there, even among only four people - and close relatives at that - informal rules dictated quite a bit of what we do; you don't do dishes if you cook dinner; don't leave food out - it attracts animals; it's a family place, we have to make sure to sweep out and clean up in a particular way before we depart. Our habitual games of hearts are punctuated not only by the rules of the game, but the informal norms that govern our particular - and lax - feelings about table talk.

But that isn't what I want to write about; I'm sure I will spill a lot of digital ink in future posts about the norms in small familial groups - there are too many opportunities and too much material. I want, instead, to spend a few words talking about what I did leave behind. Even for just five days, it was wonderful to be freed from the little social and personal rules that govern so much of what we do, and even more wonderful were the small, daily revelations that one rule or another didn't apply while I was on the island.

I didn't ever have to worry whether an email required an immediate response or how long I could wait before responding; no electricity, no internet, no computer, no email. Ditto a phone call: should I pick up? How long a conversation will it be? When will I have to call back? But - gloriously - my phone was turned off and across eight miles of water in my car. Oh! And the car! Should I drive or walk to the meeting? Can I turn left here? Am I speeding? Is that a cop? They seem trivial - and they are, for the most part - but the regulations that guide our public facade, the norms that guide our interactions with others, and the rules we impose on ourselves (have I watched too much tv today?) impact almost everything we do.

But not this last week. I didn't have to worry about who's watching when I swim - no one's around (and - as those of you who know me have guessed - swimwear is banished). I didn't worry about too much tv, the requirements cell phones and email insinuate into our lives. I didn't have to worry about what the check engine light on my car might harken (though I do now...). All I had to contemplate was the beauty of a sunset.

Rather than subject you to my further rantings, I'll supply those of a much more talented writer. Edward Abbey brings a touch more sarcasm and misanthropy, but the sense of freedom is roughly the same as he writes about rafting through the wilderness.

"My God! I'm thinking, what incredible shit we put up with most of our lives... the constant petty tyranny of automatic washers and automobiles and TV machines and telephones - ! ah Christ!, I'm thinking, at the same time that I'm waving goodbye to that hollering idiot on the shore, what intolerable garbage and what utterly useless crap we bury ourselves in day by day, while patiently enduring at the same time the creeping strangulation of the clean white collar and the rich but modest four-in-hand garrote!"

It's the "petty tyranny" that most catches my attention, and Abbey is wise to notice - in mid 60s at that - that the extent to which we come to depend on our appliances can rise to a certain despotism. This is not really my reaction - most things in moderation, most things in moderation - but I have to confess: only up there, only free from these day to day shackles, do I ever really let it go and do this:

Feels good.

Alex's Got a Gun

It turns out that very little has to happen before someone puts a deadly weapon in your hand. You would think - hope - that before someone hands you a Glock 9mm and fifty rounds of ammunition, they would give you fairly detailed information about how to use it without accidentally putting 9mm holes in yourself or others. As it happens? Not so much.

What actually happens when five spectacularly out of place graduate students go to a shooting range? First, a surly employee asks if we have a Groupon in a tone that suggests he already hates us for being rubes with a Groupon, and then we fill out forms saying we understand that this is dangerous and agree not so sue them for any reason whatsoever. We give them our drivers licenses. When asked if we've ever used a gun before, we all say either  "no" or "not a handgun" (which I think amounts to the same thing: "I don't have the faintest idea how to actually use what you're about to give me"). I detect a faint eye roll from the range employee.

He reaches under the counter and pulls up two Glock 9mm and two Smith & Wesson Sigma 9mm.

The first thing I notice is that they look heavy; they are, actually. These aren't trifling weapons. The former, for instance, is used by the New York City Police Department. Over the course of maybe ninety seconds, we are shown how to load bullets into a magazine, how to put the magazine into the gun, how to hold the gun, and how to pull the trigger. We are told that they won't give us any more advice or tips because it might eat into their lesson revenue. I'm not making that up, and I'll say it again: they refuse to go beyond this hideously brief introduction to machines that routinely - often accidentally - end people's lives, because they want me to need to take lessons from them later.

I am then handed four police issue weapons and 200 rounds of ammunition.

It's worth noting that the date is July 20, 2012. It's been about seventeen hours since James Holmes walked into a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado and killed twelve people (and maimed 58 others). One of his guns was a Glock 22, a handgun very similar to the one I now hold in my hand.

We'd made these reservations weeks before, and seriously considered canceling them and just taking the financial hit, but ultimately decided to go. We would have had Aurora on our minds, anyway, but it's made utterly inescapable by the two giant flatscreen TVs at the gun range, both tuned to 24 news discussing the attacks. It is, to say the least, heavy and surreal.

We walk across the room to the range officer (who, it seems, also already hates us). He tells us to keep the guns pointed down range at all times, where to clip the targets, to sweep up our spent shells when we're done, and he equips us with ear and eye protection. Which turns out to be exceedingly necessary. Guns are loud. No: really loud. If you haven't fired one - and I had fired a small bore rifle when I was about ten, but that was it - they're louder than you think. Even with ear protection that renders conversation almost impossible unless you're two feet away and staring directly at your conversational partner's mouth, the sound of a gun being fired hurts my ears. The "bang" kids use to simulate a gun when they're playing is woefully, desperately inadequate. It's louder than a firecracker, and it's only two feet away. But it isn't really until the guy next to use starts firing some serious caliber weapons that we finally come to acknowledge that you really are setting of a small bomb. In your hand. And that small bomb propels a piece of lead alloy up to several thousand feet per second.

This guy, by the way, unnerves us. He's wearing military-esque navy pants and matching shirt with combat boots. He has a pair of pistols: an enormous semi-automatic and a revolver with a truly concussive blast. You can see the flash from the bullet when he pulls the trigger, and it's over a foot in diameter. The pistols have a home in his police-style holster. All of this wouldn't be so alarming except his aim is truly terrible - considerably worse than ours and we just learned how to do this. We suspect he is not military at all. We keep an eye on him.

There is no way to use one of these without being keenly aware of how powerful it is, how deadly it is, and in our case this comes with what we later decide is a healthy dose of fear. I did not find it to be either pleasant, or exhilarating, but rather unnerving and anxiety producing. Each time I step up to the lane to fire off another magazine I think this time I'll be calmer, but each time I have to take a few breaths to keep my hands from quivering. Each time I finish my rounds, I feel relieved that nothing bad has happened. Each time I think this time I won't approach the gun like I would a coiled snake, but each time I do. Maybe this is a good thing, but it didn't make it very fun for me.

In fact, none of us classified it as particularly "fun." Nothing tragic happened; we went for pizza after, not to the ER like so many had to in Aurora. But we all felt unsettled, and I don't think it was because of the twelve victims who hadn't even been dead a full day. I just think firing a gun is unsettling. I doesn't relax me to walk up, carefully pick up a heavy metal object, pull a trigger, set off a small - but not THAT small - explosion in my hands and see what happens.

This isn't a post about gun control, it's really not. I, personally, favor much tighter restrictions on handguns and assault weapons, but I think everyone should go and do this. I think I would eat a lot less meat if I had to see an animal butchered every time I wanted a burger (much less if I had to go out back and kill a pig myself if I wanted bacon in the morning); I think this experience really cemented a lot about the gun control debate for me. Others will undoubtedly draw their own conclusions, but my two takeaways were this:

1) I would NOT feel safer with a gun in the house. I would feel considerably less safe and it would make me nervous all the time.

2) I feel a much deeper appreciation for the scary power a gun has, and the cavalier nature in which total amateurs (us) were allowed to use them at the shooting range convinced me there should be much tougher restrictions on how easy it is to get a hold of them.

But that might just be me. Go fire off some handguns at a range and see if you feel the same way. Just don't expect it to be fun, and definitely don't tell those guys we sent you.