No, this is wrong:
Many of the products which create a modern standard of living are only the physical incorporation of ideas – not only the ideas of an Edison or Ford, but the ideas of innumerable anonymous people who figure out the design of supermarkets, the location of gasoline stations, and the million mundane things on which our material well-being depends. It is those ideas that are crucial, not the physical act of carrying them out. Societies which have more people carrying out physical acts and fewer people supplying ideas do not have higher standards of living. Quite the contrary. Yet the physical fallacy continues on, undaunted by this or any other evidence.
No, that’s not design. That’s tinkering.
Humph. So, try it this way. Nope, doesn’t work at all. OK, so, 90 degrees around? No, that neither. Umm, the milk at the back of the supermarket? Well, actually, that works in America. But in the Czech Republic it’s the bread that’s back there – also in Portugal. The intuition – what do folk really, really, buy, so we get them to walk past all the other shite to get it – works just great. But what it is is experimentation.
So, I find myself disagreeing with Sowell. Tsk, I know.
Nope. T’ain’t ideas. It’s experimentation. The testing of ideas is the thing.
Which is, of course, why only market economies are scientific. They’re the only type of economy which actually tests ideas to see if they conform with reality, to see if they pass the Feynman Test.
It is those ideas that are crucial
No.
not the physical act of carrying them out
Also no.
the physical act of trying them out
Yes. Science, see?
Most supermarkets seem to move things regularly.
I guess the idea is to get people buying what they want to sell, stick higher margin products where the lower margin ones were.
Has the opposite effect on me as i have a 15 minute threshold in places like supermarkets. So I end up leaving without stuff I would have bought.
How far are you and Sowell apart really? A. A very long way.
But not in this particular case.
You need to have the idea first before you can conduct the experiment.
e.g. Here’s an idea. Why don’t we put the ibroprofen next to the hooch? Or white wine promotions next to the diapers?
No doubt great minds occupy themselves with such questions.
“Most supermarkets seem to move things regularly.”
I think they move them far enough for you to actually have to look at the shelves to find what you were looking for. So you then actually see the other things (as opposed to ignoring them) and perhaps purchase some.
But the general areas for things are still the same – packaged stuff in the middle, perishables around the periphery.
Move things to force you to linger? How’s that work? Sure everybody just goes in the front door, up, down, up, down each aisle, pluck stuff off the shelves as you pass regardless of where they are, through the tills and out. WhoTF is dawdling and searching for stuff, if you haven’t seen it in your passage through the building, it’s not there.
Random irritation: the morons who walk through the wrong way. The only possible way to end up doing this is to have forced your way through the damn check-out tills. HTF does their brains work to make that appear to be a way in?
That’s a pre-Internet quotation, so no longer applicable. All societies now have access to the same ideas.
The physical act of trying them out maybe. But you have to actually do something. Simply leaning back and saying ‘I wonder if—–‘ just won’t hack it.
Random irritation: the morons who walk through the wrong way. The only possible way to end up doing this is to have forced your way through the damn check-out tills. HTF does their brains work to make that appear to be a way in?
I sometimes do that when I’m buying lots of heavy tins, bottles and other packaging eg flower and cheese because I won’t want them piled on top of my delicate fruit and veg and damaging it. I go in as normal then go to the back of the store and start from there, usually the drinks area.
And that’s even when I’m doing checkout as I go and separating these things in to appropriate bags, but I know there won’t be enough room for all the bags and some need to go on top of others.
Y’alls are missing a big reason why things are where they are, and that’s because suppliers have paid them for prime positioning.
There is no quicker route to wisdom than arguing over which of the various shades of meaning of a word is the right one. Just ask Humpty Dumpty.
“…what do folk really, really, buy, so we make them walk past all the other shite to get it – ….” .
I wonder if that’s why why my local Aldi puts the beer, wine, and spirits at the back? Perhaps they know that’s what we really, really, want?
I read Sowell, perhaps incorrectly, as saying that the labour being done is less important than the ideas behind the labour. There are plenty of countries where the peasants are a-labourin’ all the live long day at the arse-end of a water buffalo. The successful societies, though, are the ones that think up the iPhone and 5G and such like. That’s why the labour to build the iPhone is shipped of to foreign, while the valuable bit, the idea, remains in Cupertino.
It’s this belief that leads to states legislating in favour of unicorns and to the detriment of technology that works.
Philip,
“There are plenty of countries where the peasants are a-labourin’ all the live long day at the arse-end of a water buffalo. The successful societies, though, are the ones that think up the iPhone and 5G and such like. That’s why the labour to build the iPhone is shipped of to foreign, while the valuable bit, the idea, remains in Cupertino.”
It’s not thinking up the iPhone. It’s the design and engineering of the iPhone. And that’s an iterative process with lots of “this should work” moments where it doesn’t because of something you hadn’t thought of.
@Penseivat
I always assumed the alcohol was at the back because it minimised the opportunity for folk to come in, grab some and disappear without paying