The Economist Views Bikini Waxing from under the Blindfold of False Necessity

WHILE driving through rural South Carolina recently, I was surprised to find that nearly every home I passed had a sign advertising some cottage industry. Each offered a range of services from “small welding projects” to “bikini waxes”&hellip:

In developed economies home production is generally inefficient. Take the at home bikini waxer, whom I assume is female. Performing bikini waxes from her home, on a back country road, limits the scale of her business…

But does this hold in the internet era? For waxing, yes…

…workers who forgo other employment opportunities will not receive the level of benefits they would get with a traditional employer; and economically, their labour will not reap the productivity benefits of scale and network effects.

Thus saith The Economist's Free Exchange blog. The smug and static picture of the economy here enrages me to no end. The writer is so fucking confident that s/he, the enlightened journalist, understands the costs and benefits of self-employment far more than the ignorant South Carolina bikini waxes, tragically forgoing scale and network effects out of some overdeveloped sense of pride or autonomy. Doesn't the entire structure of neoclassical economics that The Economist so smirkingly defends rest upon the belief that, all things considered, businesspeople know better than outsiders and regulators, that one of the prime benefits of a free market is its ability to elicit correct information at just the right time? I could have sworn that I was just reading something trotting out that damn Hayek argument the other day (not that I think it's a bad argument, but still). Are at-home bikini waxers really so stupid, so immune to the promptings of the invisible hand, that they need the help of some globetrotting Economist reporter to shore up their bottom line (apparently by "set[ting] up a commercial shop in a central location")? It's incredible how casually the writer moves between a "command economy" perspective on the stupidity and waste of competing small entrepreneurs and an academic and arrogant political economy whose sole justification is the promise that those same competing small entrepreneurs will lead us to utopia.

And how dare these fucktards purport to know the effect "the internet era" will have on bikini-waxing efficiency. Who the hell knows? Where is The Economist's crystal ball? What if multiple bikini-waxing establishments ally, pooling supplies and marketing dollars and customer references — could that yield scale and network effects? What if they enter into relationships with, I don't know, tanning salons, hair-cutting shacks, whatever — what principle of economics precludes the ability of any number of diverse initiatives to substitute for the glories of scale & network that The Economist apparently believes can only come from some kind of pubis-pruning equivalent of a megachurch?

These people think they're the capitalists. But in their stodgy self-satisfaction they forget the words of the prophet: all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned…