Tag Archives: Market Test

Tampons For Men From a Strapped Public Purse

18 Sunday Aug 2024

Posted by in Gender Differences, Scarcity

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I had to laugh when I saw this tweet on X the other day:

I actually think she was fishing for sympathetic comments from … anyone. Or it was intended as a rhetorical question, as the poster seems to regard many cis-men as the meanies in this affair. But let’s give her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she really wanted to engage with men who object to tampon dispensers in men’s public restrooms.

Before getting started, I want to be clear that I’m using the term “public restroom” to mean a restroom available to the general public and furnished by the public sector. I distinguish these from restrooms in commercial establishments intended for use by customers only.

Tampon Dispensing Is Not Cost-Free

So I have a question: who will be asked to pay for the dispensers in men’s public restrooms, their installation, servicing, and the tampons themselves? Will the tampons be dispensed at no charge, as some advocates would like? That’s the case in some public schools, so there might be a tendency to think tampons should be free in other men’s public restrooms. Of course, another possibility is to install pay vending machines for tampons, and I will address that in later sections. Here I note that I’d have no objection if they paid for themselves.

Free tampons in men’s public restrooms, or even priced tampons that don’t cover their costs, would represent a use of public resources. Taxpayers would be on the hook. Alternatively, some other public expenditure might be reduced to make room in government budgets for the new amenity. Public budgets are notoriously strapped, and foregoing other budget needs would carry an opportunity cost. Public resources should be put to the most urgent public needs, which might run the gamut from critical services like law enforcement, sanitation, and street repair to the staffing of mental health facilities.

If this strikes you as economic small-ball, remember that demands for public funds are seemingly without end. Whether taxes are increased or the budget is reallocated, “my life” is affected to a degree by every new demand that is met. To pay for tampon dispensers in men’s public restrooms, resources must be diverted from some other valued use.

Beneficiaries

Surely Ms. Fachner believes that tampons in men’s restrooms confer social benefits. Might those benefits exceed the opportunity cost of the necessary resources?

Well, biological males don’t have ovaries, they can’t get pregnant, and they don’t have periods, so we can scratch them off the list of potential beneficiaries. This is about trans- or intersex men who menstruate or perhaps suffer bleeding from hysterectomies. As I’ll discuss below, this is a small minority of users of men’s public restrooms.

But wait, here’s one advocate:

“Our culture does not really acknowledge the diversity of menstruating individuals.“

Statements like that lend absolutely no clarity. In fact, it’s a gross obfuscation made in an effort to redefine reality and exaggerate the prevalence of menstruating males.

Estimates of the Trans-Male Population

The transgender population was estimated at about 0.5% – 0.6% of the total U.S. population in 2022, based on two studies. That’s about one in every 200 individuals. However, male-to-female (MTF) transitions are 2 – 4 times more common than female to male (FTM) transitions. Combining these estimates yields one FTM in every 400 – 800 men. Of course, not all FTMs menstruate (and they don’t menstruate over the entirety of a given month). So men who might need a tampon in a public restroom are a small minority.

Nonbinaries?

Some would insist that any such estimate should account for the nonbinary population of individuals who menstruate. Part of this group is the intersex (hermaphrodite) population who identify as males. A number of these individuals have had gender-affirming care and would already have been counted as FTMs in the studies linked above (and I will continue to use “FTM” as inclusive of this group). However, I’m skeptical of the non-binary classification on surveys because some otherwise “straight” individuals use it to signal their participation in the avant guarde of gender identification, perceiving it as something fashionable or even virtuous.

Nevertheless, one 2022 poll found that the trans plus nonbinary population was about 1.6% of all adults. Combining this with the MTF/FTM estimates above, an implied upper bound on the male tampon “market” would be about 3 out of every 400 distinct visitors to a men’s restroom, or less than one out of every hundred. If the nonbinary classification is taken at face value, it’s still a small minority and probably far less than 1/100.

Woe Is We

A great many of us suffer inconveniences in life, some of them terrible, but it would be extremely costly and irrational for the state to attempt to neutralize every one of them. For example, people with overactive bladders are far more common than the trans population. Should the state accommodate them by doubling the number of public restrooms? At some point it’s worth recognizing that claims on public resources can become preposterous.

The economic argument against outfitting all men’s public restrooms with tampon dispensers falls into a broader category of common-sense resistance to eliminating (or compensating) for every tiny cross borne by anyone: every minor strife, inconvenience, or “micro-aggression” individuals might experience. The cumulative effect of this cavalcade of demands on society and on each other, which cannot all be met, is to breed discontent while stifling social and economic progress. We live in the real world where scarcity matters. We must therefore be sensible about where and how we expend our energy and resources.

Costs

I haven’t yet explored the specific costs associated with adding tampon dispensers to men’s public restrooms. Not surprisingly, it’s difficult to pin them down completely, but a few notes are helpful.

The cost of a free-tampon dispenser ranges from about $90 to $140. A pay tampon vending machine ranges from about $300 – $500. Then the dispensers have to be installed, stocked, and serviced, and there is a potentially greater cost of sanitation within each restroom. This article includes cost data from 2017-2019 for a public school district in Massachusetts. It’s ambiguous as to whether installations of free dispensers occurred in women’s restrooms only or all restrooms, but much of the article is written as if it applies to women and girls. To be clear, I don’t take issue with providing free tampon dispensers in school restrooms for females.

The dispensers and receptacles for the school district totaled $33,000, which presumably included the labor cost of installation. The annual cost of keeping the dispensers stocked was just $2.48 per student annually, but it’s not clear whether that average includes labor, or whether the divisor is the female student population or all students. Certainly all of these costs would be greater today.

Don’t Putsch It

The FTM minority is likely to grow, especially in parts of the country where advocates for the gender dysphoric have won legislative battles over gender-affirming care for youths. This is a huge mistake. It’s highly unethical to encourage unalterable, life-changing medical interventions for what often amount to youthful anxieties that usually pass with age. But these initiatives go hand-in-hand with bills requiring free menstrual products in all school restrooms and in all public restrooms. It would be more reasonable to suggest to any biological female considering a gender transition, who must weigh many considerations, that they’ll sometimes be inconvenienced by the need to pack a precautionary tampon.

Crazy Counter-Arguments

There were some interesting comments on Ms. Fachner’s tweet. One contended that men should have tampons available in the event that a female companion happens to need one. Well, it’s so nice to know that chivalry still has a place among the woke! But if a woman needs a tampon while she’s out, and if she has any sense, she’ll try the womens’ restroom herself before asking a male companion to check the men’s room.

Another commenter felt that the availability of tampons in men’s restrooms is the equivalent of condom dispensers in womens’ restrooms. Not quite! A woman out with a male companion might wish to have protection available if she expects to have intercourse. I’m not sure how many public women’s restrooms have condom dispensers, but you might find paid dispensers at truck stops, dance clubs, or other private venues where the sexes meet and greet. In any event, interest in condoms in women’s restrooms might well be a more common phenomenon than FTMs unprepared for the onset of a period.

Market Test

The mere existence of vending machines for condoms and other products in the restrooms of private establishments proves that these offerings satisfy a sort of market test. The charges for those products, including tampons, pads, and condoms in women’s restrooms, might or might not cover all of the associated costs. However, even if they don’t, the machines are provided as a courtesy to customers and/or because competitors provide them. Either way, as a market proposition, the establishments find the machines to be advantageous.

Would private establishments find it profitable to offer tampons and pads in vending machines in men’s restrooms? It’s possible, and businesses catering to non-traditional lifestyles are more likely to offer menstrual products in men’s restrooms, if only as a courtesy to FTM customers. However, it’s uncommon at best among mainstream businesses. Again, the economic logic is dependent on the volume of menstrual products likely to be dispensed. If they add value, the market is likely to provide them. This might be more plausible for machines that vend multiple products.

Successful pricing of tampons in men’s public restrooms would be easier if the probable volume was greater, but it will be quite low relative to women’s restrooms. Thus, the up-front fixed costs are difficult to justify. In any case, vending machines of any type are less common in public restrooms. Perhaps that’s because the items sold would not cover all of the associated costs. Or perhaps it’s because public administrators lack the incentives that motivate actions in the private sector. Enter the activists!

Market Failure?

One might argue that passing the market test is irrelevant because public facilities are intended to offer a range of services which the market can’t be relied upon to provide. That’s not clear cut in the case of restrooms themselves, and I’ve advocated for more pay toilets in the past. However, tampons are very much a private good. A trans-male with an unmet need for a tampon is in a bad spot, and he might generate external costs. However, I maintain that the situation is fairly uncommon, and those hypothetical external costs are fairly easy to internalize. This is not a true market failure nor a public priority.

Finally, I note again that Ms. Fachner addresses her question only to cis-men. I have news for her: like any other form of common sense, the rudimentary economic logic of costs and benefits is inclusive and available to all, regardless of sexual preference and gender identification.

Government Output: Illusions and Handicaps

09 Sunday Sep 2018

Posted by in Big Government

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Building a big government is thought to be a luxury that prosperous nations can afford, but such efforts have a systematically negative effect on their ability to generate income, much as eating the seed corn delivers a farmer to poverty. Daniel J. Mitchell puts it bluntly in a piece entitled “Rich Nations That Enact Big Government Don’t Remain Rich“. This is nowhere more obvious than in Argentina and Venezuela, two nations that were prosperous 50 years ago and are now economically feeble, or in Venezuela’s case, imploding. Government, in the final analysis, extracts resources from the private economy, often contributing negatively to productivity. Yet the idea that government is a tonic for economic growth persists, and it persists even in the face of weakness induced by excessive government.

Government statistics on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) exaggerate the contribution of government to income in at least a couple of ways. To understand why, it’s necessary to distinguish between spending aggregates and income aggregates, which add up to the same total GDP. The former  include consumption, investment, and government spending. Income aggregates are the other side of the GDP “coin”: payments made to factors of production, which represent GDP as a measure of output value.

A dissociation between these alternative views of GDP with respect to government’s contribution is that government payments count as spending and income regardless of the recipient’s contribution to output. Even if nothing is accomplished, nothing is produced, it is measured as income and spending and it is an increment to GDP. Payments to dig holes and refill them contribute to GDP as long as the government does the “job”. By contrast, if a worker in the private sector is paid but produces nothing of value, the firm’s owners suffer a loss of income corresponding to the worker’s pay, and GDP is unchanged! So increased factor payments by government cause an implicit bias in the measurement of output.

A second government bias implicit in GDP statistics is that public spending and government labor payments are often not subjected to a “market test” of value. The activity is “mandated”, so there is no correspondence to a willingness to pay or real value. Public employee unions exaggerate these distortions. There are generally no competitors for government provision of services, few incentives for efficiency, and often little discipline in government procurement processes. So the pricing of government transactions tends to be inflated. And yet when the government gets ripped off by overcharges or cronyist kickbacks, the excess payments contribute positively to GDP. In contrast, when a private firm gets ripped off, its income is correspondingly reduced and the transaction generally will not contribute to GDP.

It takes taxes to fund government, either immediate or deferred, and the taxes are either explicit or implicit in the form of eroded purchasing power. This creates negative incentives that retard private investment incentives, work incentives, and thereby private economic growth. Redistributional efforts retard work incentives as well because welfare–state beneficiaries often face high marginal tax rates on earned income.

Does big government represent a good investment for the wealth of a prosperous nation? In view of the above, one can hardly trust official statistics in rendering a judgement on that question. But despite these distortions, big government and measured economic growth are still negatively correlated. Mitchell provides more detailed analysis of government and economic growth at Heritage, including a set of references to academic papers on the topic.

One important way that government may contribute to economic growth is through the provision of physical infrastructure, which theoretically improves efficiency in private production. However, public infrastructure spending is subject to the same upward cost pressures discussed above, it is often tied to bumbling industrial policy efforts, its utilization by the public is usually mis-priced, and governments are congenitally inept at operating facilities efficiently. It is not clear that private developers could be counted upon to fill the void without some form of partnership with government, however, which has its own pitfalls. There are certainly reforms that could make private and public infrastructure investment and operation more viable, such as eliminating regulatory roadblocks to the installation of new facilities.

Another area in which government may generate a positive economic return is public investment in education, but that return is far from guaranteed. The success of public education investment depends on a wide range of cultural, political, and economic factors. For example, Cuba has the third largest proportion of government education spending to GDP, but the country’s ability to profit from that investment is severely crimped by its totalitarian economic and political system. I have been a frequent critic of public education in general, and I am not persuaded that education is truly a public good, despite some degree of spillover benefit. And while education may be a worthwhile national priority in many circumstances, it is not clear that government should necessarily fund education, let alone “run” education. Public education spending certainly doesn’t automatically translate to effective education outcomes, and it does not guarantee economic growth.

There is great exaggeration regarding the success of certain nations that have allowed government to absorb a large share of resources. That includes many of the European states, for which average incomes are roughly comparable to the Mississippi Delta. Only Luxembourg, Norway and Switzerland have income levels that are respectable relative to the U.S., and Norway relies heavily on oil extraction. Attributing economic power to government in the Nordic countries is especially misleading because the strength of those economies has always stemmed from their fundamentally capitalist underpinnings. Sweden built its wealth on capitalism, but it has cannibalized that strength over several decades with a burgeoning welfare state and high taxes. It only recently has begun attempting to reverse course.

Economic progress is unlikely to be achieved by “investing” in a larger public sector. Instead, encouraging private activity via positive incentives and minimal regulatory interference is a better route to success. The measured economic benefits of government spending are illusory to a significant degree. Even those activities thought to be the most productive avenues for government involvement, like investment in infrastructure and education, are plagued by cost inflation and incompetent execution. Finally, cross-country empirical evidence confirms that a more dominant public sector is associated with lower income growth. And yet there will always be a faction subscribing to the infantile, “free-lunch” belief that big government can deliver growth, and deliver it in excess of the predictable damage it inflicts on the private economy.