The Potential of 1 Tablespoon of JetDry

Today I inadvertently discovered the voluminous potential of JetDry. It turns out that a pretty small amount (about a tablespoon) easily generates enough suds to flood a kitchen.

In the time I've lived in my apartment we haven't (until yesterday) put JetDry in our dishwasher. Thus, water spots and wet dishes have been the norm. The purpose of JetDry is to combat these very effects: about 0.1 fluid ounces of JetDry is used during the rinse cycle to remove hard water deposits and helps the dishes dry cleaner and faster.

My roommates and I have been talking about getting some for months, but it wasn't until yesterday that my roommate Nelson purchased some. Immediately upon his return from the store Colin and I excitedly looked on as he filled the reservoir in the dishwasher. With great anticipation we decided to rerinse the already clean dishes in the dishwasher with our newly JetDry-ed water.

The dishwasher had been running only a small fraction of a minute before JetDry was streaming out of the bottom of the dishwasher onto the floor. We stopped the dishwasher and started looking for the cause. After removing the inside panel of the door and analyzing the purpose and function of various components it became clear that the design of the JetDry reservoir was such that if you overfill it the JetDry leaks prolifically into the inside of the door. It is also very difficult to tell how full the reservoir is without dismantling the door. Thus, we had probably overfilled it by at least a half pint. Closing the dishwasher door allowed all of that JetDry to run down the inside of the door and start leaking everywhere.

I cleaned up the inside of the door and let it dry overnight. It looked like everything was working okay, beyond the obviously poor design of the reservoir, so I put everything back together tonight and resumed the rinse cycle we had started yesterday.

When I came back out to the kitchen fifteen minutes later I discovered that foam and water had been oozing out around the door for most of that time. The lake extended out for a good portion of the kitchen. I stopped and opened the dishwasher to find about six inches of JetDry suds in the bottom of the dishwasher. It took a little bit of sleuthing to discover the problem: it turns out that a small amount of JetDry had gotten into the bottom of the dishwasher when we filled the reservoir initially. It also turns out that a little bit of JetDry goes a really long way (remember it normally only takes 0.1 ounces per cycle). It took a half dozen cycles of filling the dishwasher with water on a rinse cycle and then promptly draining out the water before all of the JetDry was flushed out of the dishwasher.

In the end the dishes in the dishwasher were indeed spot free and dry. Overall, I'm pretty impressed with the difference it has made so far. No more spots. No more wet dishes. I think it's certainly been worth the hassle of filling the dishwasher with a little JetDry.

Christmas: An Economic Inefficiency

I realize that Christmas is over now, but I've wanted to address this topic so I am going to do it anyway. I have heard a number of economists (both students and professors) cite and discuss the economic inefficiency of Christmas—particularly of gift-giving. I typically think about this each year at Christmas time, and this Christmas has been no exception; however, this time I did some more thorough reading on the subject and have come to some conclusions of my own.

The groundbreaking article on this topic was entitled The Deadweight Loss of Christmas and was published in 1993 by Joel Waldfogel, an economist that was then teaching at Yale University. The article is an easy read, not too long, and quite interesting. I recommend reading it if you are at all interested.

In economics a deadweight loss is an inefficiency in the economy in which goods or services could be reallocated to make people better off. Christmas gift-giving can be thought of in these terms. Suppose that you want to give a gift to someone and have fifty dollars to spend. In most cases, the most optimal outcome (in terms of utility maximization for the recipient) would be for you to give the money to the recipient and let them spend it themselves. Presumably, they know their own preferences best and would be able to best spend the money to maximize their own utility. If you buy the person a gift instead, odds are that they will not value the gift as highly as what they would have spent the money on themselves. Thus, the gift is inefficient and they are not as well off as they could have been had they simply been given the money.

Dr. Waldfogel researched this effect. He asked a number of people to list the gifts they received, the relationship they have with that person, the cost of the gift, and the recipient’s maximum willingness to pay for the item they received, among other things. He was then able to analyze the data to determine the amount of devaluation that occurs when giving gifts. (For example if you receive a gift that was purchased for fifty dollars and you would only pay twenty five for the same thing then the gift lost 50% of its value.)

The data was analyzed in a number of ways. The results that I found most interesting are as follows:

Giver	% Yield	% Cash
Aunt, Uncle	64.4	14.3
Sibling	86.2	5.8
Parents	86.5	9.6
Significant Other	91.7	0.0
Grandparent	62.9	42.3
Friend	98.8	6.1
Overall	83.9	11.5

The first column indicates the percentage of the gift’s value that is retained when given; the second is the percentage of gifts in the category that were cash. Thus, we can see that the most efficient gift is from a friend (98.8% yield), then from a significant other (91.7% yield), and so on. On average across all gifts given, gifts only retain 83.9% of their value when given.

Economists look at this and conclude that the economy would be better off (more efficiently allocated) if everyone simply gave cash or if people did not give any gifts and simply spent the money that they would have spent on gifts on themselves. In either of these cases, gift devaluation would be virtually nonexistent and the economy would be better off. The output of an economy is often measured by GDP which uses the final purchase prices of goods as the value of the economy’s output. This is somewhat misleading if the goods are purchased and then on average immediately lose 16.1% of their value by being given as gifts. In this case, the economy (as well as an average individual in the economy) is not really the amount of the increase in GDP better off. Thus GDP is overestimating the health and output of the economy. The level of GDP could legitimately and optimally be achieved, however, if gift-giving was cash only or simply eliminated. Then GDP would then reflect the actual increase in value of goods outputted by the economy.

This perspective has a large amount of validity; however, I think there is an alternative way of looking at it. Gift-giving does have value—both to the giver and to the receiver—although this value is much more difficult to measure. Even knowing that giving a gift will cause devaluation of the gift, people still want to give gifts. In some ways, this is not much different from a shipping cost. Shipping costs on gifts do not directly benefit the giver or the receiver but are necessary costs incurred in order to give a gift to someone that is not nearby. Similarly, gift devaluation is a “gift-giving cost” that the gift-giver (and receiver) gladly pays in order to give a gift. (Although, this is different in some senses, as shipping costs are part of GDP but the “gift-giving cost” is not.)

I believe that in many cases the gift-giver is maximizing utility by purchasing and giving a gift—if they simply gave money or spent the money on themselves they would not be able to achieve the same level of utility. When I think about what I could have purchased for myself with the money that I spent on Christmas I think it would be very difficult—and maybe impossible—for me to be happier spending my money elsewhere. Similarly, the receiver often gets more utility out of receiving a gift than purchasing the same thing for themselves. Even if they would not have purchased the particular item given as a gift themselves, there is still additional utility gained from receiving a gift—whatever it is—from someone you care about.

So what’s the moral of this? Putting time, effort, and thought into giving a gift does count for something—at least 16.1% of the gift’s value on average. If as either a gift giver or receiver we feel like gift-giving is inefficient and that there is a deadweight loss in the gift, then I think we are missing the point of gift-giving and need to reevaluate our perspective and/or the gifts we are giving.