(Weights and) Measures

From my younger days, I seem to remember that this call would come out at key moments in drinking games, though I forget the details. However, the value of units of measurement and particularly their pricing was brought home to me in Austria last week, when A & I spent a week in the old archduchy and spent most of it drinking wine Anna did have some beer, but I was keen to visit Heuringen having failed to notice these on previous visits; I liked this one not least because it has family tree of the Esterhazys in one of the rooms.

I digress, the most interesting thing about all drinking establishments over there is that wine is priced strictly by volume, i.e. a glass (a 125ml glass is standard) is precisely a sixth of the price of a bottle. As a result we drank far less (we would have spent less but for the exchange rate - thanks Gordon) than we do normally. This makes perfect economic sense of course: deprived of the price incentive to buy bottles, it is better to retain flexibility (assuming you expect to get served frequently enough) so rationally one orders by the glass. As a result you are less likely to overorder and end up with wine unwanted, but drunk.

So, in support of the new paternalism, I think this is exactly the kind of idea that would make a difference to drinking habits (which we're officially worried about, not that you'd be able to tell) without much effort. The government seems to be thinking about making the right measures available, but it's really the pricing that is key to this. As ever, they've never really understood that.