Friday, August 02, 2013
Real science, up to a point
Neat little article in Popular Science online about the supposed oddness of tipping. Well written and genuinely informative, unlike most "science" articles, which are either tautologically obvious or wildly false.
I didn't realize that customers prefer a tipping system over a non-tipping system, but it's shown both by surveys and by a nicely controlled experiment:
When the Linkery, a small San Diego restaurant, shuttered its doors this summer, it ended a fascinating social experiment. The Linkery had instituted a standard 18 percent service charge in lieu of tips, and had refused to accept anything on top of that. Meanwhile, its sister restaurant down the street, El Take It Easy, operated under a traditional tipping model. The upshot, as owner Jay Porter points out: people totally resented the Linkery for taking away the power to tip.Good science, by God. The article then examines tipping from the theoretical viewpoint of economists, and fails to notice a typical piece of bad science. "Problem is, people like tipping. Which is weird, because it doesn't make much economic sense." Whoa there! What is economics? Scientific examination of human behavior. If actual human behavior doesn't make sense to economists, you can't conclude that actual human behavior is weird or doesn't make sense. You have to conclude that economists are stupid. As usual with modern "scientists", they're treating theories as religious axioms, and rejecting facts that disagree with the axioms. ¶ 4:29 AM
