popular logistics

The original Teddy bear can be found at the Smithsonian Institute National Museum of Natural History.

The Law of Diminishing Returns: Teddy Bear Corollary:

“A child will be love one stuffed animal. And will also love two. He or she will give them names. With 10 or 20, however, there will be the one or two named favorites on the bed, and the rest will gather dust in boxes, drawers, shelves, under the bed, etc.”

Once people have enough food to eat, and a warm clean bed in which to sleep, additional things don’t make people happy. Or, as Bill McKibben put it, in Deep Economy, “Up to a certain point, more really does equal better.”

Below $10,000 money buys happiness, and as Ed Diener and Martin Seligman quantified in “Beyond Money,” University of Illinois, etc, (click here) “Above U. S. $10,000 per capita income … there are virtually no increases … in well being. Moreover, health, quality of government, and human rights all correlate with national wealth, and when these variables are statistically controlled, the effect of income on national well-being becomes non-significant.”

McKibben tells the story of Du Pei-Teng, who by age 20 had managed to save $12,000 yuan over the course of two years in a shower curtain factory. This is about half of what Du would need to build a small house in his hometown. McKibben reported that Du was able to save this sum by giving up Coke-Cola, even tho it only costs about 8 or 9 yuan, because one can of Coke each day, over two years, would amount to about 6,000 yuan – half of what he had saved, and one fourth of what you need to build a hosue and start a family in China.

McKibben also interviewed Liu-Xia, an 18 year old woman at the same shower curtain factory. Most of the women had teddy bears on their beds. Not Liu-Xia. “I asked her if she had a stuffed animal on her bed. Her eyes filled ominously. She liked them very much, she said, but she had to save all her earnings for her future.” Tears welled up when she thought about how nice it would be to own a stuffed animal. In that world possessions still deliver. When I returned to the factory with the largest stuffed dog available in that corner of northern China, the girl was as pleased as I’ve seen a person. Not only that, but the other kids living in the factory seemed enormously happy for her as well.”

“My daughter would have appreciated the same stuffed animal, but not with anything approaching the same intensity. Her bedroom boasts a density of Beanie Babies (made, doubtless, in some other Asian factory) that mimics the biodiversity of the deep rainforest. Another stuffed animal? Really? So what? Its marginal utility, as an economist might say, is low.”