Keeping Transaction Costs Down*

Via Andrew Sullivan, I see that the Chinese government is following the B.C. government's trailblazing example and requiring people to register their blogs with the government.

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Meanwhile, pogge takes up a task I considered but rejected, mocking the hyperbolic language of the Chamber of Commerce in this National Post story.

My favourite line from the Chamber was, "To say that program spending is out of control would be an understatement,"

When supposedly serious bodies like the Chamber of Commerce mistake the word 'understatement' for the word 'exaggeration', you can almost see their credibility dropping away - an aspect of this which Rob at 'One Damn Thing After Another' makes some good points about as well.

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Finally, I agree entirely with Andrew Spicer's take on some possible amendments to the Same Sex Marriage legislation aimed at placating the 'social conservatives' in the Liberal caucus. What he said.

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* A popular theory (generally attributed to economist Ronald Coase) holds that organizational size depends on transaction costs. If transactions between different parties have a high cost then it makes sense to get rid of the transaction cost by controlling both sides of the transaction. In this modern age with low transaction costs, one would expect companies to begin to shrink accordingly (since there are no longer as many situations where it is more efficient to have both sides of a transaction in-house).

Similarly, there is a certain amount of overhead in writing a blog post (coming up with a title, and pressing the publish button mainly). So when the individual entries are small enough, it makes sense to lump them together so as to keep the ratio of the transaction cost / to the cost of the post itself down to a reasonable level.