A short note on growth and horses and life at Baker

At the dawn of the 20th century, no less a respected publication than Scientific American reported that economic growth in Manhattan was about to reach its limit because the island could not support any more horses.

Economic growth did continue continue in Manhattan in spite of its equine capacity, largely because people found new ways to use the space they had more efficiently. The lesson to learn is that economic growth stems not from cramming more horses onto your island, but from figuring out new, smarter, better ways to use the island that you've got.

Fast forward a hundred and ten years to Baker University, the little university that tried to be big. Truth be told, the marketplace is tough--Baker looks a lot like a thousand other small, struggling, liberal arts colleges. To compete, Baker tries to offer as many opportunities as possible to its students. We have dozens of sports teams, organizations, honor societies, and fraternal organizations. And that's just for students (and a relatively small student body it is). As faculty (and a relatively small faculty it is), we're advising or sponsoring those groups, serving on committees and task forces, supervising internships, and advising students. This in addition to teaching a heavy load of classes and trying to stay current in our fields.

Last year, I served as a faculty advisor to a student group. The group suffered, as groups sometimes do, from lack of mission. The meetings were poorly attended, and in a vicious spiral of causation, the main topic of conversation at each meeting was how to get more students to come to meetings. 

This exercise in absurdity is symptomatic of a life in which people are stretched too thin to give their full attention to the pursuits they have chosen. Baker will not distinguish itself, nor will it effectively compete with its rivals, if its faculty and students persist in the attitude that growth occurs because we've crammed more opportunities, activities, committees . . . horses onto our little island. True growth, the growth that allows a village to become a New York City or a Baker to become a Harvard, comes from doing fewer things, but giving them the time and attention necessary to do them better than anyone else. 

In that spirit, this year I plan to spend less time worrying about "more and more," and more time focusing on "better and better." 

Enough of the broken windows, already!

President Obama has assembled an economic team with tremendous brainpower.  These guys are super.  Really. So it's pretty amazing to me that the collective wisdom of that team must surely have been ignored when the administration created this little project:

Part 1: "We, the U.S. Government, will purchase your used car for $4,500 if you buy a new vehicle."

Okay, so some might find that part of the plan objectionable--government is not generally in the habit of subsidizing our purchases, and some training in economics will allow you to show that every dollar car buyers receive from the program costs someone else (we don't know who, but why quibble) a bit more than a dollar. But we were in a recession, and car companies were having a hard time, so if government believes that the auto industry is important and needs to weather the storm, I at least understand that. It's the second part of the plan that I find absolutely stunning:

Part 2: "After we purchase your used car, we will destroy that car by pouring molten glass into the motor."

So if the goal of propping up ailing automakers is accomplished by part 1, then why the need for part 2? All the plan does is take a perfectly good car that someone might have gotten a great deal of use from--perhaps someone who couldn't afford a new car even with the subsidy--and destroy it in the name of job creation.

That car simply becomes another broken window. And the lesson for Obama's economic team is that they should try harder to impress upon our policymakers that nobody--not a gang of hooligans, a hurricane, or a government--can create wealth by destroying wealth.

Meet Cooper!

I warned you that this wasn't going to be an "all-business" blog, didn't I?  So meet my little boy, Cooper!

More broken windows . . .

Of course, the idea that the broken window created a flurry of economic activity is neither new nor particularly original.  One hears the same thing about wars -- "WWII pulled us out of the Great Depression" -- and about natural disasters -- "Hurricane Andrew created thousands of jobs in Homestead, Florida."

The problem with such reasoning is this: it is true that the broken window made our guy spend money with the glass dude, who could then buy a TV, who could . . .  But here's what's often ignored: what might the first guy have done with his money if he didn't have to spend it on a new window? Perhaps he would have spent it on a flat panel television. Or perhaps he would have put it in the bank, where someone could have borrowed it to buy a new car. Either of these actions would have touched off just as much spending as the broken window did.

The point is that in the first case, we get a lot of spending. But in the second case, we get exactly the same amount of spending and we save ourselves a broken window. WWII was indeed a great thing for the American economy, unless, of course you count the half-million people who died and all of the tanks, jeeps, ships, and planes that were destroyed in the process.  And those jobs in Homestead were jobs created simply to replace what had been destroyed, not to create anything new.

When we evaluate the impact of an event, it is not right, accurate, or fair for us to look only at the benefits, we must also look at the costs.

About broken windows . . .

A man wakes one morning to find that some punks have thrown a rock through his living room window. He calls his window dude, and the window guy rushes out to replace the window at a cost of a few hundred bucks.





The window guy is now a few hundred dollars to the good, and after all, it's March Madness, so he rushes to the appliance store to buy a flat-panel TV.

The appliance salesman had been wondering how he was going to pay for his daughter's college tuition, but no more. With the few hundred bucks he received from the window guy, his daughter is free to take that econ class she's always wanted.

The econ professor has been needing some new suede patches on the elbows of his sportcoats, so he takes the appliance guy's money and . . . well, you get the picture by now. Just look at all of the economic activity, all of the income, that has been created by that broken window.

Aren't we lucky that window got broken?

And if breaking windows makes a society rich, then maybe we should hire those young punks to go out and break some more.



The town in the photo above is surely very wealthy.

Immigration and Free Trade

It's fascinating to me how many people are advocates of free trade but opposed to free immigration. You can import your labor in human form, or you can import it embodied in a product or service. In either case, you are hiring an foreigner to perform work for you; where the work actually gets performed is largely immaterial. 

Sunk Costs are Sunk

One of the cornerstones of economic analysis is what we call "marginal thinking."  Marginal thinking simply means that we look forward one step from wherever we happen to be, compare costs and benefits of actions that we're considering, and take those actions whose benefits outweigh their costs. It takes some calculus to prove, but making marginal decisions in this way tends to produce the highest level of available well-being for those that practice it. 


Despite the fact that we do marginal analysis every day, it's still easy to fall into the trap of chasing sunk costs.  Sunk costs are costs that have already been incurred;  the saddest thing about sunk costs is that no matter how badly you want to, or how hard you try, you cannot get them back.  And making decisions based on what has already occurred violates the forward-looking principles of marginal analysis.


Consider, for example, the moviegoer who plunks down $15 to sit through what might possibly be the worst movie of all time: "Dude, Where's My Car?"  Within minutes, the moviegoer knows the movie will be terrible, but sits through the rest of the movie because, "I've already bought the ticket."  Or the college senior who discovers that she hates French literature and never wants to speak another word of French, but continues taking courses in the major because, "I've already got 20 credit hours."  Both of these people are choosing an action based not on what is to come, but what has gone before.  The moviegoer should be asking, "What else can I be doing with the next two hours that is better than watching this stinkpot of a film?" The student should be asking, "What field of study can I choose that I will enjoy more than this stinkpot of a major?"


I recently found myself guilty of chasing sunk costs when I spent the weekend with a friend of 32 years.  At the end of the weekend I realized that I really don't like him, have not liked him for many years, and that I spend time with him primarily because we have a shared history. My friend is a human version of "Dude, Where's My Car," and it's time I realize that this is one movie that's not going to get better if I wait.  Every minute I spend indulging my once-friend is time away from more valuable uses...and so I'm walking out of the theater.