I don’t pretend to understand it, but it’s either funny of fascinating. This is the Slate columnist whose normal topics of discussion are why a recent Supreme Court ruling actually has the unintended consequence of holding most government activity is too expensive to tolerate. Or why driving with cell-phones has more benefits than costs.
But this essay is entirely on peeling bananas. You might think, from reading his past work, that he would turn it into an telling analougy on some more traditional economic problem. But nope: it’s in all seriousness about the most efficient way to peel a banana, which is, really, no more or less an economic problem than anything else. So it’s either a coy self-parody or just plain delightful.
So: here’s a worthy great debate: what IS the best way to peel a banana?
Actually, it is a factual question that’s certainly debatable: what are the efficiency concerns in even extremely trivial tasks like this? Can we measure them? “Best” is not just “I like it best.”
No, you do not need a knife to peel from the bottom.
I’m an economist, and this is just the sort of thing we talk about in the tea room. There are about ten points in the article which precisely mirror the things about which economists typically disagree. It’s a nice job. Seeing as I don’t like bananas though…