The market for boobs. The market is for boobs.

The first time I read about the Tulip mania, I simply could not believe that people could have bid up on Tulips. I mean, Tulips! A flower!

If people could have bid up on Tulip bulbs, well, I figured that people are capable of bidding on any damn thing.  As long as people feel that the price is right and that they are coming out ahead.  It is one heck of a strange economic system that I will never truly, emotionally understand, though I can pretend to intellectually grasp the idea.

It is one thing to put a price tag on goods in the market.  But, do we really want to find out what the best price is that will work as incentives for mothers of newborns to breastfeed?  The longer I live, the less I will understand anything, I fear!

New mothers are to be offered up to £200 in shopping vouchers to encourage them to breastfeed their babies.

Seriously?  British mothers don't understand that concept on their own?  I am willing to bet all the tulips that new mothers have a whole range of reasons, perfectly rational reasons, for why well-informed new mothers choose not to breastfeed even when they biologically can.

Btw, how did they arrive at 200 pounds?  Why not 100?  Or 2,000?  Aaaaah, I should stayed back in engineering and earned my millions and retired like how my super-wealthy friend is in retirement now!

How will this incentive scheme be implemented?

Midwives and health visitors will be asked to verify whether the women are breastfeeding.

Sounds like this is from the Onion, right?  If only it were a joke!

XX Factor's take appeals to me:

What is almost never discussed in these exhortations to breast-feed is how hard it can be on mothers, particularly without social support. At the beginning, you are waking up several times a night to feed, and you’re exhausted and drained. If you don’t have a lot of help with your children—perhaps you are a single mother—and you have to go back to work, you might want those extra hours of rest more than you want £200. You might be able to be a better parent to your other kids with that extra sleep and energy, or you know, just a happier person.
...
I just don’t see how breast-feeding is so important we should consider spending government money to bribe women to do it.

As if this is not enough to make me wonder about incentives and price, I am reminded of the news from a few days ago about breast milk bought online here in the US having salmonella and E.Coli.  Which raises a whole number of questions: buy and sell breast milk? And online at that?

Three quarters of the purchased human milk was contaminated with gram-negative bacteria that can pose serious health risks in babies, the researchers found. Three of the samples were contaminated with salmonella. E. Coli was also detected in some samples, an indicator of fecal contamination. 

I certainly would not have imagined "fecal contamination" and "breast milk" in the same sentence.  I tell ya, it is one heck of a brave new world!

As of now, the sale of human milk via the Internet is almost entirely unregulated. Based on the postings on the milk-sharing sites, the sellers are mostly mothers who have a freezer full of expressed milk and aren't sure what to do with it, Keim said. The buyers are mostly women who have had trouble producing enough milk -- or any milk -- and were determined to feed their babies breast milk.

So, will we develop regulations on this?  Will there develop a black-market for breast milk?  Dark alley transactions?

Source

Maybe I am simply getting old.  Maybe this is how my grandmothers felt when they faced the changes during their times.  As much as I wonder how all these are also part of "progress," I am sure the generations that went before us had their own pangs over "progress."

The intellectual me understands these developments. The emotional me, on the other hand, finds all these just bizarre.

The world was way simpler, and fun-filled, when I was a single-digit-aged kid in PK Master's maths class!