{"id":1325,"date":"2009-02-11T01:48:27","date_gmt":"2009-02-11T09:48:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/?p=1325"},"modified":"2009-09-27T22:00:34","modified_gmt":"2009-09-28T06:00:34","slug":"mutatis-mutandis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/?p=1325","title":{"rendered":"<spa style=\"font-style: italic ;\">Mutatis Mutandis<\/span>"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In <a href=\"?p=26\">an entry on 27 February of last year<\/a>, I wrote <blockquote style=\"font-size: smaller ;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/mocketymock.com\/\">The Woman of Interest<\/a> alerted me to the fact that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.usps.com\/\">the <abbr title=\"United States Postal Service\">USPS<\/abbr><\/a> will be increasing its rates again in May.  A one-ounce, first-class stamp will cost another US$0.01.<\/blockquote><\/p> <p>The problem here is that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.usps.com\/\">the Postal Service<\/a> long-ago passed the point where each increase in price caused a drop in total revenues, as people began switching first to facsimile machines and, more recently, to e.mail.  And officials report their expenses as continuing to <em>climb<\/em>, which shows that they're not paring dis\u00b7economies of scale.  Basically, officials increase the <em>price<\/em> per letter in an attempt to off-set the <em>cost<\/em> per letter which increases as the <em>number<\/em> of letters decreases because of past <em>price<\/em> increases.  It&#8217;s a death-spiral. This morning, <a href=\"http:\/\/mocketymock.com\/\">she<\/a> informs me that the rate will be increased by US$0.0<em>2<\/em> this coming May.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In an entry on 27 February of last year, I wrote The Woman of Interest alerted me to the fact that the USPS will be increasing its rates again in May. A one-ounce, first-class stamp will cost another US$0.01. The problem here is that the Postal Service long-ago passed the point where each increase in [&hellip;]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,36,4],"tags":[64],"class_list":["post-1325","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","category-economics","category-public","tag-usps"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1325","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1325"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1325\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}