Hobonomics 101

My kind of Economics! The second paragraph is sooo true. Cigarette butts in Alberta are probably longer than in other areas of Canada.

dailyspeculations.com

First the difference between a hobo who hops freight to travel from job to job and a tramp who doesn’t work, is that the hobo reads the Wall Street Journal before using it as insulation and the tramp simply uses it for insulation. The hobo:tramp ratio is a good indicator of the employment situation because it rises directly with the number of available jobs. Hobos are inveterate readers because they have so much time to fill waiting for freight cars to arrive, so a good first indicator of the employment situation is the number of issues of the Wall Street Journal found underneath the bridges where hobos congregate.

The fundamental hobo indicator may now be revealed. The size of cigarette butts on the ground is directly proportional to the health of the economy. The hobo is always on the lookout for a discarded butt. And when he has to smoke one very short “snipe” after another, then hard times are here. The original smokers are so strapped they are smoking right to the ends as not to waste a penny. To be fair, Rose Wilder Lane, in the Discovery of Freedom, was the first to note international differences between the size of discarded butts. But I believe that Bo and I are the first to track changes systematically within a country over time.

h/t: Kottke