Matt Lucas is fantastic as Tweedledum & Dee.
If you thought this looked like a Tim Burton film then you’d be absolutely right! His wife (Helena Bonham-Carter) is playing the Red Queen…
An amusing excerpt from something I was listening to while walking to work this morning:
One of the earliest and most aggressive exponents of this economic imperialism was Gary Becker, the Chicago economist par excellence, who in an article published in one of the profession’s most prestigious journals applied the principles of microeconomics and consumer behaviour to what he called the market for marriage. Becker defined marriage as an arrangement to secure the mutual benefit of exchange between two agents of different endowments. In other words, people marry in order more efficiently to produce ‘household commodities’, including ‘the quality of meals, the quality and quantity of children, prestige, recreation, companionship, love, and health status’. The rational person will base any marriage decision on quantifiable costs and benefits. The gain from marriage has to be balanced against the losses – including legal fees and the costs of searching for a mate – to determine whether marriage is worthwhile.
Becker went on to analyse the effect of ‘love and caring’ on the nature of the ‘equilibrium in the marriage market’. To do so he defined love as ‘a non-marketable household commodity’, noting that more love between potential partners increases the amount of caring and that this in turn reduces the costs of ‘policing’ the marriage. Policing, of course, is needed ‘in any partnership or corporation’ because it ‘reduces the probability that a mate shirks duties or appropriates more output than is mandated by the equilibrium in the marriage market’. There’s no need to put a padlock on the fridge if your partner loves you. After pages of differential calculus, Becker reaches a triumphant conclusion: since love produces more efficient marriages, ‘love and caring between two persons increase their chances of being married to each other’.
What Becker’s wife thought about this analysis is not recorded, but in 1992 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences was sufficiently impressed to award him the Nobel Prize for Economics for this and related work.
My brother, Nick, is going to Dubai in the UAE very shortly, to work as an architect in the construction boom they have going over there. His wife, Ange, and Rowan (my nephew) will be joining him a couple of months later. They will be away for three years.
 It seems to be the season for friends and family to leave NZ…
Anyway, here is a picture of Dubai (taken at the time of the 2000 Millennium celebrations):
(click on picture for large view)
