Have You Even Ever Seen a Chicken? My Blog’s Named Explained

I received an e-mail yesterday which asked about the humor in the name of my blog title. The blog is named the blog of diminishing returns. It is a pun on the “law of diminishing returns.” The law of diminishing returns is basically this, if you are growing corn on a fixed amount of land, the impact of more corn seed will eventually go to zero. Now it may be that when we first start planting going from 10lbs of seed to 20lbs of seed will actually yield more than twice as much, but I don’t know I have never grown corn. Or if you are cooking in one kitchen as you keep adding more and more cooks the helpfulness of the next additional cook will fall.

In a sense the blog is a fixed input (there is only one blog), but my time spent on it varies. So each post I make provides a positive impact, but if I make too many the benefit to you of an additional post will fall. Plus my posts will get really crappy.

This also makes me think of diminishing marginal utility. Which works the same way home much happier the first slice of pizza makes you, will be more than the third, which will be more than the fifth

I think the same things about jokes. If you have heard the same joke five the fifth time wasn’t as funny as before. Sometimes though as a joke is repeated it gets funnier, it has increasing returns. I was thinking of the show Arrested Development, where whenever someone acts like a chicken people make the most ridiculous chicken noises. I wonder if other arrested development fans make chicken noises at each other?

For arrested development fans, click below for a chicken noise montage.