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For Valentine’s Day, Eileene got me Tim Harford’s The Undercover Economist, an economic primer. Unlike classical economics, which assumes a perfectly rational and perfectly liquid market, Harford prefers to focus on the imperfections of the market: the fluctuations occasioned by a sudden change, the response of price to the margin between more and less desirable commodities, markets distorted by corruption, and taxes seeking outcomes other than simple revenue. By doing this, he explains nonsensical behavior, or rather behavior that would be nonsensical behavior in a perfect market, and which therefore appears counterintuitive to the reader who knows nothing but Smith’s “invisible hand” and the tidy intersection of supply and demand curves at a common price.

I’m only about a fifth of the way through. So far, Harford has spent a lot of time on pricing schemes, especially those designed to squeeze more money out of those willing to pay more without losing customers who aren’t by overpricing minor variations on the basic product. I got a lot of amusement out of this section, because he frames the tactic in the environment of a grocery store, and it accurately reflects my grocery shopping experiences with Eileene, especially when we were first dating. I was a poor grad student (and had always been a cheapskate), and Eileene was an undergrad with a respectable allowance. I was sensitive to price; she was less so. So I was careful in my purchases, while she fell prey to any number of devices Harford describes groceries employing: significantly higher prices for a marginally better product, or for prominently displayed products, or products placed where price comparisons were inconvenient. The results were entirely predictable, yet she was always astounded at our receipts, and especially at the little note at the bottom announcing how much we’d saved by taking advantage of “special offers” (which weren’t all that special).

It gives me a smug delight to think I’m largely free from the seductive powers of advertising and marketing. It lets me think I’m that much smarter than anybody else, though of course intelligence deserves no more credit for protecting me from bad purchases than do my miserliness, skepticism, and general negativity.

Nevertheless, when I’m all alone with my thoughts, I have to question that independence of mind. I catch myself now and again in denial, rationalization, or wishful thinking, so it’s not like I’m immune to the irrational urges that drive us. A more likely explanation is that I’m simply not the target audience. Different tricks work on different people, and vendors can’t use all the tricks at once. Maybe I’m relatively free of marketing gimmicks because shoppers who think like me are just too uncommon to be worth the advertising budget. Voters who think like me may be too few to be worth alienating another voting block. People who are convinced of propositions the way I am may just not be the kind of parishioners churches really want.

Insignificance confers a great deal of intellectual freedom, but does intellectual freedom have any value when practiced in insignificant ways?