Monday, December 11, 2006

Crowding Out....With Crowds of Government

From our boy Stossel:

"...ABC's '20/20' went to Sioux Falls, S.D., and San Francisco. We asked the
Salvation Army to set up buckets at their busiest locations in both cities...even though people in Sioux Falls make, on average, half as much money as people in San Francisco, and even though the San Francisco location was much busier -- three times as many people were within reach of the bucket -- by the end of the second day, the Sioux Falls bucket held twice as much money."


(Nod to KL, as always)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Maybe people in San Francisco have more charities to choose from? Maybe those rabid secularist-pacificists are scared off by the idea of a Salvation Army?

Mungowitz, you're a certified/certifiable social scientist: How useful is data in that segment?

Mungowitz said...

Ya know...if this were a JOURNAL article, that would be an interesting question.

As it is, I would say there are many explanations. I'm not even sure the phenomenon itself is interesting, because it is not clear what it is....