"There was this weird tendency for businesses of the same kind to be located very close to each other in Baku. "
This is very common in Latin America and MENA. It gives the opportunity for buyers to compare and decide on price and conditions easily, by just asking for what they're looking for in one shop, and then the next, and then the next. Particularly in less car-centric countries.
"I also think nearly every street block in Baku had a pharmacy on it. Sometimes this led to a situation where two or three pharmacies were facing each other on the same intersection."
Again, this is usually a "third world" thing. Pills are cheaper (when high copayments) and faster (when there's health rationing) than a visit to the doctor. Also, not a 100% sure, but I've seen several indications that in some parts of the world doctors are more inclined to give prescriptions than they are in the West.
Great read. Just this morning my American college student son was telling me about an Azerbaijani classmate of his and then I saw a link to your writing. Wonderful timing.
great post, and curious to see the country through the eyes of a foreigner! a small correction: in your translation of the text about Khankendi, “derdin alim” is not “the scholar said”. It’s “dərdin alım” - “may I take away your grief”.
Howdy, I was also an economics student who wondered about business clustering, though I was inspired by NYC’s Chinatown. I was finally taught a plausible theory in a pricing class: Hotelling’s Law!
I only worked two Hotelling locational problems, and it would take me some refreshment to do one today, but here’s my attempt at an intuitive explanation:
If you have a shop in a given city, you want to be the closest shop to as many potential customers as possible. If there are two shops, this means each of them will try to be as near to the population-weighted center as possible, so each of them can capture half the customers. Deviating from this equilibrium cedes some of your customers to the other shop, because you’re moving closer to customers that you’ve already captured, but losing marginal customers (those who were previously near-equidistant from both shops).
Reaching conclusions when shops and dimensions > 2 is something I don’t quite trust myself to do intuitively, but after rotating some shapes, I would be surprised if the equilibrium looked hugely different from the 2-shop one.
The above-linked wiki article, and the ‘Locational model (economics)’ also have some decent explanations, and you might own a textbook that covers this, if you want to do some math
There are of course a bunch of assumptions that you’re probably already making as a student of economics, and maybe some empirical replication issues iirc, and it doesn’t seem to explain the whole ‘six businesses on the same street’ thing, but it’s a step!
Greatly appreciated the post! ‘Thoughtful, researched travelogues’ is a great genre, and you executed it very well.
>From what I understand, in most of the Soviet world the “n-word” was considered to be a neutral term of description for black Africans
You are probably thinking of "негр" and its cognates in central Asian languages. This is not the "n-word" and is simply the analogue for "negro" which was a perfectly neutral name for black Africans until the past hundred years (see "Universal Negro Improvement Association"). In the Soviet sphere, the culture wars that drove "negro" off the euphemism treadmill simply never happened.
Fantastic read, far more informative than anything else I’ve read about the country. I feel like I’ve been there now!
"There was this weird tendency for businesses of the same kind to be located very close to each other in Baku. "
This is very common in Latin America and MENA. It gives the opportunity for buyers to compare and decide on price and conditions easily, by just asking for what they're looking for in one shop, and then the next, and then the next. Particularly in less car-centric countries.
"I also think nearly every street block in Baku had a pharmacy on it. Sometimes this led to a situation where two or three pharmacies were facing each other on the same intersection."
Again, this is usually a "third world" thing. Pills are cheaper (when high copayments) and faster (when there's health rationing) than a visit to the doctor. Also, not a 100% sure, but I've seen several indications that in some parts of the world doctors are more inclined to give prescriptions than they are in the West.
Great article!
I think the clustering of businesses is universal in old cities eg London. Great for consumers if you want to get competing quotes for something
Great read. Just this morning my American college student son was telling me about an Azerbaijani classmate of his and then I saw a link to your writing. Wonderful timing.
great post, and curious to see the country through the eyes of a foreigner! a small correction: in your translation of the text about Khankendi, “derdin alim” is not “the scholar said”. It’s “dərdin alım” - “may I take away your grief”.
My bad - many thanks for the correction! I was glad to experience it, it is a lovely and under-appreciated corner of the world!
Howdy, I was also an economics student who wondered about business clustering, though I was inspired by NYC’s Chinatown. I was finally taught a plausible theory in a pricing class: Hotelling’s Law!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotelling's_law
I only worked two Hotelling locational problems, and it would take me some refreshment to do one today, but here’s my attempt at an intuitive explanation:
If you have a shop in a given city, you want to be the closest shop to as many potential customers as possible. If there are two shops, this means each of them will try to be as near to the population-weighted center as possible, so each of them can capture half the customers. Deviating from this equilibrium cedes some of your customers to the other shop, because you’re moving closer to customers that you’ve already captured, but losing marginal customers (those who were previously near-equidistant from both shops).
Reaching conclusions when shops and dimensions > 2 is something I don’t quite trust myself to do intuitively, but after rotating some shapes, I would be surprised if the equilibrium looked hugely different from the 2-shop one.
The above-linked wiki article, and the ‘Locational model (economics)’ also have some decent explanations, and you might own a textbook that covers this, if you want to do some math
There are of course a bunch of assumptions that you’re probably already making as a student of economics, and maybe some empirical replication issues iirc, and it doesn’t seem to explain the whole ‘six businesses on the same street’ thing, but it’s a step!
Greatly appreciated the post! ‘Thoughtful, researched travelogues’ is a great genre, and you executed it very well.
You meant "reins" instead of "reigns", several times.
Mea culpa, that it always referred to rulership must have been messing with my internal writing monologue...
Awesome writeup. One note:
>From what I understand, in most of the Soviet world the “n-word” was considered to be a neutral term of description for black Africans
You are probably thinking of "негр" and its cognates in central Asian languages. This is not the "n-word" and is simply the analogue for "negro" which was a perfectly neutral name for black Africans until the past hundred years (see "Universal Negro Improvement Association"). In the Soviet sphere, the culture wars that drove "negro" off the euphemism treadmill simply never happened.