The Country Bird and the City Bird

By -
Question for class discussion in microeconomics:

"Country birds" are generally very shy around people, and won't come close to them. "City birds," on the other hand, come quite close to people in the hopes of getting a handout or scooping up some dropped food.

We can assume all bird populations were once more like country birds. How did the city-type birds arise? What economic concept can you use to help explain this happening?

Comments

  1. John Goes12:58 PM

    A few entrepreneurial city birds made billions in bread crumbs and opened up a whole new market.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous7:07 PM

    I think that if you investigate this issue more deeply, that you'll find the same dynamic as that found in both dogs (many centuries ago) and raccoons (in more modern times). Familiarity is the key, and it generally gets passed on through generations. While this is generally a taught trait, it certainly has implications for genetics when one considers which form become most dominant within a species.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah7:23 PM

      Right on, Joseph, but which major microeconomic theme makes this clearer?

      Delete
  3. Anonymous9:30 PM

    Is it a subsidy? For example, a bunch of libertarian farmers normally would be very hostile to evil government workers, but if the government decides to give them a subsidy, they might become more friendly.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hasdrubal11:31 AM

    Uncertainty: The country birds do not have many opportunities to observe people, so they do not have much information to differentiate them from predators. City birds observe many more people, enough to observe that they act significantly different from predators; they sometimes even provide food. So risk averse country birds will avoid humans while risk averse city birds will pester them.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more