I thought the ‘new life sale on eBay’ was the ultimate proof that economics is ubiquitous, that markets are in everything and everywhere, anytime, but I now found another candidate for that. Imagine you want to stage your own public protest (say you’re against globalisation and you want to make that known to everybody- after all it’s so fashionable nowadays): you can now buy your own crowd of protesters ( I see that the max crowd is rather small for now: only about 318, this is how many volunteer protesters are registered) at 145 euro / a piece (and you can choose each and every one of them, say you only want blue eyed blondes, for instance: they do post a photograph of themselves). The only thing you should take into consideration is that you can’t really buy protesters for whatever cause goes through your mind, they will not protest for neo-Nazis, for instance (which is comforting, to say the least…). Anyways: apparently- unfortunately for those of you who got already excited about the ‘buy a protester’ idea- this is available only in Germany for now, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see this expanding far beyond that country’s borders. Here’s a BBC article with more details on the topic. I got the link, as with most ‘markets in everything’ links, from Tyler Cowen, on MR.
