{"id":26,"date":"2008-02-27T11:01:14","date_gmt":"2008-02-27T19:01:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/?p=26"},"modified":"2009-09-22T21:17:30","modified_gmt":"2009-09-23T05:17:30","slug":"gloom-of-night","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/?p=26","title":{"rendered":"Gloom of Night"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><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.<\/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's a death-spiral.<\/p> <p>Post officials have long been told, and surely recognize, where things are headed.  They probably feel that there would be little for them but grief in attempting at this point to promote the reforms that could get the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.usps.com\/\">the Postal Service<\/a> off its present path.<\/p> <p>My expectation is that we will eventually be told that <q>privatization<\/q> failed, that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.usps.com\/\">the Postal Service<\/a> will stop pretending to be a firm, and that its prices and services will be determined by political and bureaucratic notions of necessity and of justice, with overt subsidies off-setting ever-increasing deficits.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"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 price caused a drop in total revenues, as people began switching [&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-26","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\/26","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=26"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}