{"id":894,"date":"2008-12-22T21:18:53","date_gmt":"2008-12-22T10:18:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/?p=894"},"modified":"2008-12-22T23:17:36","modified_gmt":"2008-12-22T12:17:36","slug":"separation-of-church-and-postage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2008\/12\/22\/separation-of-church-and-postage\/","title":{"rendered":"Separation of Church and Postage"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Here&#8217;s a real-life economics puzzle for you.<\/p>\n<p>Explain why it is cheaper to send a Christmas card (or more accurately, a Seasonal Greeting card, posted in November or December) than it is to post an equivalently-sized small letter. [<a href=\"http:\/\/www.auspost.com.au\/statutorydocuments\/ratesdetermination\/Section_B.htm#P9_77\">Ref<\/a>] <\/p>\n<p>Bonus points if you can restrict yourself to using economic arguments (e.g. explain how increased demand, but relatively static supply, leads to lower prices, or perhaps how the dominant Christian-consumer demographic is more cost-sensitive than the overall population) and avoid religious ones (e.g. because charging full price would make baby Jesus cry).<\/p>\n<p>Merry Bah and Happy Humbug.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Why is it cheaper to send a Christmas card?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[329,57,195,327,328],"class_list":["post-894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-observation","tag-australia-post","tag-australian-culture","tag-christmas","tag-economics","tag-scrooge"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=894"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/894\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":897,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/894\/revisions\/897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}