Last Friday I found out about the 60th anniversary celebration of the Swedish Alfa Romeo owners club taking place on the following day through a printed newspaper ad of all places. Of course I had to go and it was great. It’s really something in the French and Italian part of car culture here that is sort of protected from all the macho-complexes and cockiness often associated with it.
What I’m trying to say is that they handed out free cinnamon buns and had a pink bouncing castle for the kids and everyone felt welcome as long as they didn’t bring up who was going to tow who home at an all-Alfa meetup etc. If this would have been an equivalent BMW-meeting they would just have thrown some raw tobacco at you and in best case have a punching bag filled with wheel nuts if “the little snot trolls” needed distraction. One weird thing was that Alfa Romeo themselves were nowhere to be seen. With the Giulia being launched and all, it seems like a missed opportunity. Anyway, pics:

Economics! I’m partially an economist and I think it is mind blowing how such a messy discipline rules so much of politics and, thus, every day life. Even more surprising that it all seems to work somehow. Now the #1 public paper of the profession had a nice reminder of an article that I know many here have read, but that could also be of interest to even more people: George Akerlof’s “The market for lemons”.
“Mr Akerlof’s idea, eventually published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1970, was at once simple and revolutionary. Suppose buyers in the used-car market value good cars—“peaches”—at $1,000, and sellers at slightly less. A malfunctioning used car—a “lemon”—is worth only $500 to buyers (and, again, slightly less to sellers). If buyers can tell lemons and peaches apart, trade in both will flourish. In reality, buyers might struggle to tell the difference: scratches can be touched up, engine problems left undisclosed, even odometers tampered with.
To account for the risk that a car is a lemon, buyers cut their offers. They might be willing to pay, say, $750 for a car they perceive as having an even chance of being a lemon or a peach. But dealers who know for sure they have a peach will reject such an offer. As a result, the buyers face “adverse selection”: the only sellers who will be prepared to accept $750 will be those who know they are offloading a lemon.
Smart buyers can foresee this problem. Knowing they will only ever be sold a lemon, they offer only $500. Sellers of lemons end up with the same price as they would have done were there no ambiguity. But peaches stay in the garage. This is a tragedy: there are buyers who would happily pay the asking-price for a peach, if only they could be sure of the car’s quality. This “information asymmetry” between buyers and sellers kills the market.”
..aptly illustrated, too:
http://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/full-width/images/print-edition/20160723_EBD001_0.jpg