Pimps Lurk Here

I don't read

2008-04-15T13:13:00.002-06:00

Yes, the title explains it all: I do not read. Specifically, I do not read for class. No textbooks, no course packets, no online journal articles, and certainly no ego-stroking HBS case studies. Amazingly (perhaps), I’ve managed to not look at a single reading—required or optional—for any of my classes since the start of this semester. Part of it is sheer laziness; part of it is to see just how long I could get by as a graduate student who refuses to read. I report my findings below.

The only real lesson I learned from a semester of ethics is that everything can be distilled into a 2x2 box, which I shall use to present my argument in an aesthetically pleasing form. Whether or not this distillation is a good idea is a different question entirely, but what good is a HKS education if you can’t inappropriately apply the skills you’ve learned?

So now I boil the issue down to two main questions: is reading beneficial for my grade and is it a good use of my time? I believe the answer to both questions is no. But, as any good HKS student knows, readers like to see subtitles, so now I can break the remainder of this article into healthy, bite-sized chunks.

Is reading beneficial for my grade?

As anecdotal evidence, I am not failing any of my classes. In fact, my midterms and assignments have so far been above average. Moreover, tales from other students show that a good portion do little or no reading for their classes, yet few, if any at all, have failed a class. In fact, judging from the claims from this sub-group which range anywhere from “I aced the class” to “I barely scraped by”, I’d wager that the grade distribution of people that don’t read is remarkably similar to the overall grading curve. In other words, reading is not correlated with grades. There are several possible reasons for this.

First, graded materials seldom rely on content found only in readings. Even if a text is required on the syllabus, the gist of it is covered in class or in handouts (if you’re inclined to skip). I suppose the exception to this would be case-based classes that involve cold-calling. Fortunately, I’m not taking any case-based classes because I’ve never learned much from them in the first place.

Second, the educational value of readings is low. Articles and cases are usually a good twenty to forty pages, sometimes longer. Of that, only a handful of pages are actually useful and mentioned in class. This goes back to my first point: the stuff you read is often completely unnecessary.

Third, and a more debatable claim, is that the people who tend to do all the readings diligently may be those that are pretty darn smart to begin with. So it’s not the readings that are the cause of higher grades for these individuals; rather, they’re just naturally brilliant. Kudos to them for being both a genius and incredibly organized enough to take on the hundreds of pages of readings assigned every week, but I don’t think their grades would be hurt very much if they stopped reading for class.

If we really wanted to be nerdy about determining precisely how reading is associated with grades, we could collect data on students at HKS and try to estimate it using OLS. If our sample of HKS students is representative of the student population here, then we’d have an estimator that would have great internal validity for those of us at HKS. And since this is Harvard after all, who cares about external validity and other schools?

My stance, like any good economist these days, is that reading has no association with grades. However, like any other post-PAE MPP2, I am also too lazy to go about doing the required data collection and analysis. So I hereby bequeath this task to our more motivated and curious MPP1 brothers and sisters. I suppose it would make an excellent PAE topic too.

Is reading a good use of my time?

Now that I have established that reading is of dubious academic value, we can now judge whether it is a worthwhile endeavor given our busy schedules. This is a question about opportunity costs, which is really just jargon for “best alternative.” With only twenty-four hours in each day of our finite lives, is it really a good idea to spend these precious moments reading things we’re bound to forget by the next week? Not only are we spending time reading mind-numbingly long articles, we are also missing out on all the things we could be doing instead. Imagine how many Kodak moments you may have lost just because you had to read another chapter of a textbook.

Logically, we would only choose to read for class if the marginal utility of reading was greater than the marginal utility of our next best alternative. Since I believe that reading is poorly associated with grades, the marginal utility of reading is quite low. Furthermore, it also exhibits diminishing returns: reading two pages of the abstract and conclusion will be more useful than reading the next two pages of drab methodology and so on. Besides, if I really wanted to learn what was in these readings, I’d just look at the class handouts or go to a review session where the teaching fellow did all the reading and thinking for me.

Thus, if I had to read something, why would I choose dull journal articles on why smart people think they’re so smart when I could be reading about the latest escapades of Lindsay Lohan, et al. in Us Weekly or OK! Magazine? Alternatively, why read anything at all when I could be doing more productive activities such as baking apple-cranberry bread pudding or watching America’s Next Top Model? Life is simply too short to be spent buried in course packets.

Conclusion

Reading for class is both of minimal academic value and a poor use of time. While initially my “no reading” resolution was borne out of laziness and the desire to rage against the machine (I’ve always wanted to say that), I’ve come to realize that by not reading, I have saved countless hours each week to spend on more enjoyable activities without adversely impacting my grades. Thank you, HKS. Without your incredibly boring (and expensive) course packets and textbooks, I would never have found the light.

My Summer Job

2007-10-20T15:02:00.000-05:00

To anyone curious as to what I did this summer, this video about sums it up. Yes, this is forefront of the battle against poverty. Ain't the World Bank grand?

Find-Ben-a-Boyfriend, Part III: Identifying GAMs

2007-08-22T12:14:00.001-06:00

Now, back to the subject of much interest: FBaB! For those of you that haven't been keeping up with my previous posts, FBaB stands for Find-Ben-a-Boyfriend, my ingeniously proposed federal program to improve my (and possibly others') social welfare. My previous posts on FBaB are listed below. For those of you who are not up to date on the background of FBaB, I strongly recommend reading these posts first.

Is Being Single a Market Failure?

Find Ben a Boyfriend, Part II

To briefly recap, here is the gist of the program, summed up in just a few short points:

1. There is a (dating) market failure that unfortunately leaves both Ben and good, available men (GAMs) single (not that Ben and GAMs are mutually exclusive categories; I like to think of myself as a GAM. No laughing!).

2. The government can improve this situation by introducing FBaB: a dating "subsidy" that will allow consumption to reach its socially optimal level and leave Ben single no longer.

3. FBaB satisfies the conditions for good public policy in that it is pareto-improving (it makes me and others better off without making anyone else worse off) and that the benefits outweigh the costs (a subsidy-per-date is relatively cheap and the benefits are incalculable).

I now turn to one of the questions posed by an astute reader: how can we tell if a guy is a GAM or not? For simplicity's sake, let us suppose that the male population of the world is divided into two groups: GAMS and assholes. In an ideal scenario, GAMs and assholes would be readily identifiable by anyone. For example, assholes would wear big signs that say "Ass" taped to their foreheads. Alas, this is not the case however, because Constitution insists on equal treatment (but do assholes really deserve equal treatment?). So, there's no easy way of spotting an asshole before it's too late. What does this mean for the effectiveness of FBaB?

Let's go through this step-by-step:

1. The willingness-to-pay for a date will be higher for GAMs than assholes. This is because assholes just want the money and could care less about the date itself whereas GAMs want to do the actual romantic coupley stuff that invariably cost money. Suppose for our sake that the willingness-to-pay (WTP) of a date for a GAM will be $40 and $20 for an asshole;

2. The government cannot distinguish the difference between GAMs and assholes;

3. Because the government cannot distinguish GAMs from assholes, it will offer a subsidy based on the weighted average of GAMs and assholes in the population. If the ratio of GAMs and assholes was 50/50, then the subsidy will be $30 (.5x40 + .5x20 = 30);

4. Unfortunately, $30 is less than the $40 that GAMs need to make a date worthwhile, so they opt not to use FBaB and remain (sadly) single. Only assholes will elect to use FBaB;

5. Because only assholes will use FBaB, the government will subsequently only give $20 per date, because that is the WTP of assholes.

This is what economists call "adverse selection." I like to call it "a shitty situation" because I would rather not date only assholes. Dating assholes does not improve my welfare. So in order to make FBaB effective, we need some way to distinguish GAMs from assholes. Now, obviously no man with any degree of intelligence would willingly declare himself to be an asshole when an additional $20 is at stake, so voluntary identification is out of the question. At the same time, painstakingly interviewing or investigating each man who applies to FBaB is expensive, time-consuming, and generally not a good option all around. What alternatives are there?

Fellow geeks would now raise their hands and go, "Oh oh! I know!" One option to separate GAMs from assholes is signaling. Signaling is a clever little idea where one group uses some obtainable characteristic to allow others identify them as part of that group. A geeky example would be using a college degree to signal people with higher natural ability. Another less geeky example would be die-hard comic book fans dressing up as their favorite character to go to comic book conventions to show the industry peeps that they're the real deal (ok, that was also pretty geeky). In any case, there are certain qualities that make a good signal.

1. The signal should be a pretty good determinant of the characteristic in question. Education, for example, is a pretty good predictor of ability, though obviously not perfect, as the throngs of college-educated morons will happily attest to.

2. The benefits of the signal will be different for the two groups. In our case, the benefits for GAMs will outwiegh the costs of obtaining the signal, but the benefits for assholes will be less than the cost. In the education/ability example, this means that for people with high levels of ability, education pays off in the end whereas low-ability people find that getting that college degree just isn't worth it.

3. There are other minor characteristics (e.g. non-transferrable) that also make up a good signal, but the first two are the big ones.

So, what would be a good signal to distinguish between GAMs and assholes?

Well, my previous post on the results of The Asshole Survey show a possible association between assholeness and alcohol consumption: men who drink more tend, on average, to be more of an asshole than those who drink less. Eureka! Here is a potential signal we can use to separate the assholes from the GAMs.

Suppose the government institutes a requirement that all men applying for FBaB subsidies have to undergo a test to see if they've been drinking any time the past week. Maybe a daily breathalizer test or something (now, we can argue about whether or not this is feasible, but let's assume that the technology exists and it can be implemented). How will this ensure that GAMs apply to FBaB while assholes stay clear?

Well, let's look at the costs and benefits of the FBaB subsidy (the subsidy will be now the full $40):

For GAMS: They get the full $40 and a date with yours truly all for the cost of not drinking for a few days. Since GAMs tend not to drink a lot to begin with, they don't value being drunk a whole lot. Therefore, FBaB represents a net benefit.

For Assholes: They still get the full $40 and a date, but this time the value they attach to the cost of not drinking is much higher. Because assholes tend to drink more, being prohibited from drinking carries a much higher opportunity cost for them. Additionally, since they're only out there to pocket the 40 bucks, the value of the date with me is negligible. So this represents a net loss for them. As such, assholes will tend not to apply to FBaB.

And there we have it: a simple way to filter out assholes and leave only the good men. Isn't it amazing what a little ingenious policymaking can do to improve a person's (i.e. me) love life?

The Asshole Survey

2007-07-21T12:55:00.000-06:00

First off, I apologize for the severe lateness in this post. I shall try to post more frequently (hopefully!).

Going back to the subject of assholes, I often wonder what makes a person an asshole. Using less statistically forceful language, I wonder what factors are associated with assholeness. A previous post of mine, The Search for the Elusive Asshole, talks about why we need to find ways to identify assholes and therefore pick out the non-asshole, good men in the world, if they do indeed exist.

So, let's come up with some ideas of what characteristics could be associated with assholeness (note that I say 'associated' because we're not talking about actual causal effects at this stage). We have to be careful not to list traits that are themselves characteristics of assholenes, like being mean, chauvinistic, etc. What we are looking for is a trait that isn't itself indicative of assholeness, but is something that assholes often tend to be.

Lets take, for example, drinking. Now, drinking itself doesn't make a person an asshole (unless they're a mean drunk, but that's another story), but perhaps assholes are more likely to drink more than non-assholes. Seems plausible, no?

Now it's time to look at the survey data:

Asshole rating is on a scale of 1-5 where 1 is not an asshole at all, 3 is neutral, and 5 is total asshole. The numbers in parentheses are standard deviations for all the geeky types who want to see it.

The mean asshole rating actually shows that men are distributed around the middle of the spectrum, which is neither total asshole or total saint. Actually, the average of 2.97 means that men are on average slightly less assholeish than 3, though statistical tests show that this difference is not significant.

So, now it's time to do all the real fancy statistical work. The table below lists the results of several regressions:

Ok, now I will try my best to explain all these numbers in layman's terms. The numbers reported are the coefficients of each variable (drinks, weight, smoker, etc.) and the number in parentheses are the standard deviations. The asterisk indicates the coefficient is significant at the 95% level. I'm not going to go into what statistical significance means, let's just say at 95%, we're pretty damn sure the answer is close to the number we have.

The first regression shows how the asshole rating changes for each additional drink the guy consumes in one week. This regression does not taking into account any other factors that might influence both drinking and assholeness that would affect our results (something that is called bias in statistical jargon). That's why all the other variables are listed as (-) because they weren't included. What this shows is that on average for every 1 drink per week a guy consumes, their asshole rating goes up by 0.173. What the "constant" term means is that for a guy who consumes 0 drinks, they're average asshole rating is 2.118. So a guy who drinks 15 drinks a week goes from a pretty nice guy to a total jackass. Pretty crazy huh?

Now, you must be thinking that there must be some factors that would skew these results. Regression 2 goes one step further and takes into account some variables that might have an effect on the coefficient of drinks. It seems that smoking has a rather large association with being an asshole, but this result is unfortunately not significant at the 95% level. Although most of the coefficients here are not significant at the 95% level, controlling for them is still important, because we can see that the change in the coefficient of drinks means that there other characteristics bias the results and by controlling for them we filter them out.

One interesting possibility is that the girls they date may be associated with assholeness. After all, there's the whole "dating bad boys" phenomenon, and some girls just have really bad taste (for the sake of confidentiality, this survey will not be used to name names). I'm not going to say that some girls make guys assholes or that assholes will only date some girls, that's a whole different can of worms I'd rather not open, for fear of my safety. Anyway, in order to account for the possible "girl-factor", if one actually exists, the third regression also includes girl fixed effects, thereby controlling for each girl's own unique characteristics. Interestingly enough, this makes the coefficient on drinks even greater, suggesting that the girl-factor does indeed exert some bias into the results.

So, what's the conclusion from all of this? I'd be hesitant to conclude with any certainty that more drinking causes a guy to become more asshole-like. However, there does seem to be some positive association between how much a guy drinks and how likely he is to be an asshole. Whether this is the effect of the drinks itself or some other omitted variable is yet unknown. Clearly more research is necessary for the good of science.

Hoya Saxa

2007-03-28T21:23:00.000-06:00

So, I just returned from a very enjoyable, albeit exhausting, trip to the fair District of Columbia. I seem to have had particularly good luck in picking this time to venture south. To this I must give kudos to the peeps at Harvard for picking such a timely week for spring break. Anyway, let's look at the perks for the last few days:

1. Georgetown beat UNC in the NCAA quarterfinals.
2. Awesome 80-degree weather
3. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles! (Yes, I am serious, the movie was amazing and it actually beat "300" over the weekend. Booyakasha)
4. My old boss loves me and wants to hire me again (well, this one was pretty much in the bag, but it's nice to pad my ego now and then)
5. Did I mention Georgetown beat UNC? (Final Four!!!)

It's weird, I'm not even a basketball fan. Hell, I'm not even a sports fan, but watching that game on Sunday was insane. It has made me want to watch the next games. I've even been tempted to gain 100 lbs, a goatee and buy one of those super-comfy lazyboys so I can sit down in front of my TV with a beer in one hand and popcorn or buffalo wings in the other and yell at the screen like a good American (or in my case faux-American). Perhaps this is mob mentality at its best. Or then again, maybe mob mentality looks more like this:

Crazy huh? Though to be honest, to call this crowd a riot would be like saying that light cream cheese is as good as the real thing or that Cheney is good VP (I giggle inside).

I particularly like the guy who thought of this event as an excellent excuse to get laid.

"Hoya Saxa or Hoya Sex-a?"

"Final Four or Final Foursome?"

Go forth, young man, and prosper.

This is also why the buses stopped coming, and I was waiting on the street with this little lady who kept talking to me about how the buses were always late and sloppy and incompetent, to which I wholeheartedly agree. After all, just compare the rather shabby looking Metrobuses (picture above) to those nice DC Circulators (picture below) that started running two years ago.

Now honestly, if buses were men, I'd totally do Mr. Circulator, whereas you'd have to pay me to touch Mr. Metro with a walking stick. In fact, if you look at the pictures closer, you can see an young lady about to board the Circulator while some old crone is attempting to climb aboard the Metrobus while also trying to unsuccessfully hide herself behind the bus stop pole. The lesson is clear: old fogeys ride the Metrobus; cool kids like me (and you) ride the Circulator. Yep, I'm on the cutting edge of transportation chic.

Perhaps Mr. Hoya Sex-a's next tryst will be of the four-wheel kind *shudder*

An "Oh crap!" Moment

2007-03-02T20:11:00.000-05:00

On a totally unrelated to FBaB and assholes note, I just downloaded a simple budgeting sofware called Buddi, which is free but they do ask for donations (I write this to support free software). I figured this would help me find out where all my money goes, because it clearly is not in my pockets.

As of right now, my current net worth is a whopping $-13,526.32.

Hooray for student loans. Oh well, at least I have good credit.

To illustrate the severity my financial dilemma, I thank my fellow blogger, Froggy, at the Friscalating Dusklight for posting the link to this rather apt picture:

The Search for the Elusive Asshole...

2007-03-02T13:27:00.000-05:00

So, my school always likes to stress the practical, real-world applications of what we learn in class. After all, what's public policy good for if it only exists on paper?

One of the things you hear time and time again from the female population is that all men are assholes. Their ex-boyfriends are all jerks (but note that they seldom think that when they first start dating them...perhaps there is a reverse causality?) and clearly there is a lack of justice in this world and male assholes (who supposedly abound in the wild) should be shot, locked up, castrated, or something of the sort. Now, I can't address the justice or corrective measures, but I can certainly take a look at the normative statement that "all men are assholes."

Now, one way of looking at this is to test the null hypothesis that all men are assholes:

Ho: P(Asshole|Male) = 1

That is to say that across the entire human population, if all men are assholes, then the probabilty of being an asshole, given that you are male, is 100%, or 1.

Here's a nice venn diagram to illustrate:

The only problem with this is that it's just too easy to invalidate: just find one good male soul and the statement falls apart. Surely one would not classify the Ghandis, Mandelas, and Dalai Lamas of the world as assholes, but perhaps their numbers are quite few. Given the 3 billion or more males on the planet, a 1 in 10 chance of being a non-asshole is still good enough for there to be a decent non-asshole population for women (and gay men) to fight over. So lets be slightly conservative with our estimate and say something like 90% of men are assholes, which leaves us with 300 million good men in this world. This would look somewhat like this:

P(Asshole|Male) = .90

So, one of the ways we can test this is to take a random sample of men, see if they are assholes, and test if the rate of asshole-ishness among men in the sample is significantly different from the population mean of 90% that we have asserted. To do this, we can use a simple statistical t-test (I'm going to use non-traditional symbols simply because I don't know and am too lazy to figure out how to do the fancy signs that statistics likes to use):

(X-Y)/SE
Where:
X = population mean, which is .90;
Y = sample mean (the observed percentage of male assholes);
SE is the standard error, which is Z/SQRT(N), where Z is the standard deviation of the sample mean and N is the size of the sample.

The diagram above shows a normal distribution curve for the percentage of assholes among males. It is centered on the population mean, 0.90. The blue shaded region is the 95% confidence interval, which means in laymen's terms that if the sample mean that we obtain falls outside the shaded region, we are 95% certain that the sample mean is different from the population mean. In otherwords, if we get a percentage of 80% or something outside that blue area, there is a 1 in 20 chance that our figure was simply a fluke, but a 19 out of 20 chance that it really means something significant: that the percentage of assholes among males is not 90%.

But here we have a dilemma: how do we know what makes a person an asshole?

Before we can even attempt to test what the true percentage of assholes is among men, we must first be able to identify them accurately. Of course, many of you will say that assholes are pretty easy to distinguish, but then again, if they were, you wouldn't have dated them in the first place! So we need to first determine what factors in a person give rise to asshole-ishness. This requires regression analysis (and a future post!)

To investigate, a friend of mine and I are conducting a survey of women that asks them to describe the characteristics of their boyfriends, past and present. Through this, perhaps we can obtain the causal relationships that relate to asshole-ishness among males. And the world will be better off.

If any altruistic woman out there would like to add their data (err... history) to this study, please email me, and I will furnish you with a copy of the survey for you to fill out.

For the good of science!

Find-Ben-a-Boyfriend, Part II

2007-02-22T22:09:00.000-05:00

It seems that my previous post has generated quite a flurry of comments and controversy. While undoubtedly the very idea of government stepping in to help an individual find a boyfriend seems like unnecessary overkill to many, I hope that this intellectual exercise at least provokes some movement of those mental gears. My goal is to turn your thoughts from an initial "this guy is a moron" to a more amiable "the argument is ridiculous, but he has some interesting ideas".

So what kind of policy would Find-Ben-a-Boyfriend (FBaB) look like? That depends on the way the dating market is shaped and how government can best resolve the market failure involved.

Now, in the context of FBaB, let's take a look at one of those comments you always hear the girls say that will help shed some light on what the market looks like:

All the good guys are either taken or gay!

Well, it turns out that in my situation, all the good ones are either taken or straight. How ironic. In the end, both statements reflect the same thing: lack of good, available men. What does this mean in economic terms? Scarcity! The relatively low supply of good, available men (henceforth abbreviated to GAM) creates scarcity power in the hands of those who own the good, in this case the GAMs themselves. So what happens if supply power is concentrated in the hands of a few handsome, polite, nigh-perfect gentlemen?

Monopoly, silly! What else?

(Well, technically it's more of an oligopoly, but I'm not going to delve into the details of game theory here. Let's assume that GAMs function as a single unit and do not conspire against each other.)

Looking at the graph below, we can see that GAMs will date when the marginal cost (MC) of dating = the marginal revenue (MR) of dating. The price at which they will do so is at PM and the quantity of GAMs dating is at QM (this means that the GAMs to the right of QM are either full of themselves and choose not to date or that their marginal cost of dating is very high and perhaps unaffordable).

Note however that this means that the monopoly equilibrium point is not at the market equilibrium of Q* and P*. This means that there are some people who would date if the market were efficient but unfortunately cannot (i.e. Ben). This is represented by the shaded triangular region, where Ben is sadly situated.

What a travesty! Ben (and others) are effectively shut out of the market due to monopolistic control by GAMs. Now, invoking the spirit of American capitalism and free market competition, I believe that this suboptimal market outcome can be corrected with some clever government intervention in the form of FBaB. See the new graph below.

With FBaB, the government essentially subsidizes the GAMs to date at what would otherwise have been below their marginal cost. Their marginal cost curve shifts out from MCo to MC1 and the new dating equilibrium is at MC1=MR. Thus, price moves to P1=P* and quantity moves to Q1=Q*. The result of this expansion of dating means that the shaded region, previously an efficiency loss of people willing but unable to date, has been regained: Ben is now on the market! *wink* *wink*

So, lets do a brief summation of the lessons learned today:

1. Monopoly is bad. A dating monopoly is even worse.

2. Public policy can correct monopoly distortions and restore efficient outcomes. FBaB, which takes on the form of a subsidy to GAMs to date more, results in the maximization of welfare.

3. FBaB benefits not just Ben, but all those who are in the shaded region with him. Thus, FBaB has a positive consumption externality. This just keeps sounding better and better!

Of course, the idea of subsidizing GAMs to date more does sound a little like pimping them out as a form of government love whores. But let's not think of it that way and envision FBaB as providing a little incentive for those high-maintenance GAMs to date more poor commonfolk such as myself by covering the cost of a dinner and a movie. It's not prostitution, it's eliminating financial barriers to potential happy couples!

Well what are you waiting for? Call your Congressperson and tell them to support FBaB!

More than meets the eye...

2007-02-18T18:28:00.000-05:00

I wish my children could be Transformers; that'd be so awesome (then again, perhaps this is why my friends tell me I should never have offspring). It's the perfect solution to when you have guests coming over to visit and you don't want your kids in the way.

"Ok kiddos, it's dinner party time, you know what to do."

*Kids transform into snazzy entertainment set*

"This is so much better than being swindled at Best Buy!"

Speaking of Transformers, a friend sent me this link on how to make your very own Optimus Prime. If I had a color printer and the patience to sit around and cut out the damn things, my room would be littered with them. They're not as good as the real thing (which goes for more than I am willing to pay right now) but I always wanted an Optimus Prime toy as a kid so now is my chance to relive the moment.

Is Being Single a Market Failure?

2007-02-17T23:17:00.000-05:00

Wow. Even Jon gets more action than I do. Though I suppose that after 28 years, it was about time for him to have a successful date. But seriously, perhaps I need to reassess my current quagmire when presented with evidence that a man in yellow tweed jacket has better luck than I do. Of course, this is just a cartoon, but I know that there are Jons out there in real life. Right?

I have this crazy idea that dating could be an area for public policy. After all, if Singapore has government sponsored dating programs, why can't the rest of the world? Let us consider the conditions:

1. Is there a market failure? Ben is single, ergo market has failed.

2. Can public policy produce superior outcomes? Ben having a boyfriend is clearly a Pareto-superior outcome because it makes it makes a person (me) better off without reducing the welfare of others. This assumes that my hypothetical boyfriend enjoys being with me and I do not crowd others out of the dating market: two perfectly plausible assumptions. So, if government can help me, then certainly net social welfare has increased. See diagram below:

3. Is it cost-effective? Well, I suppose I don't have a very good answer to that, seeing as how I don't really have any idea how much it would cost to implement a Find-Ben-a-Boyfriend program. I can't imagine it being much though, and of all the different options to pursue, none of them could ever come close to say, the amount of money spent on Iraq... or even on airline tickets for Congressmen. Are the benefits worth the cost? Well, if you subscribe to the idea that "money can't buy love", then surely even attempting this equation is pointless. If we are to implement Find-Ben-a-Boyfriend (now abbreviated to FBaB), then we should do so if

Benefits - Costs > 0
or Benefits > Costs
or Benefits/Costs > 1

But since the Benefits (i.e. the sappy 'Ben is in love' deal) cannot be monetarized, then we are left with an undefined fraction. So, I propose that rather than dilly-dallying in quantitative quandaries, we should just assume that "love conquers all" and that the Benefit/Cost ratio is greater than 1.

So now we have successfully concluded that, at least from an economic standpoint, FBaB is a worthwhile endeavor. Now, certainly there are other arguments as to why FBaB shouldn't be implemented, such as how it seems overly paternalistic and an intrusion into individual liberties. I'm not going to tackle that front, partly because doing so would take way too much time, but also because they have some valid points. After all, economics is not always the final-say in every rational argument, is it?

But then again, if Jon can get some on his own, why can't I? Perhaps all I need is 28 years like him.

First Post! Oh wait, it's not a race

2007-02-13T21:54:00.000-05:00

Well, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that it took me over 15 minutes to come up with some witty title for my blog name. When in doubt, you can always rely on your high school English teachers cauldron of quotes. They're best used out of context.

Even though I've still got about 100-or-so pages of reading to finish for class tomorrow morning, I feel the odd desire to keep typing on this as my current (though perhaps not permanent) form of escapism/procrastination. Undoubtedly this will bite me in the ass come tomorrow while I sit in class while my professor calls on hapless and vulnerable students--myself among the many--to answer questions on the role of international actors in development policy change. How geeky.

I'm afraid that my economics course has had this perverse effect of making me weigh all decisions through cost-benefit analysis, although my way of doing it would certainly make give my professors stomach ulcers. For instance, let's look at the cost of these course reading packets that put a big dent in my bank account (full, or perhaps not so full, of money that I technically do not have) versus the benefits of having these paper behemoths at my beck and call.

Assuming there are 4 course packets (possibly more, but I will be generous) at $75 per packet. Let's say that they are purchased at 2 week intervals, and the semester is a total of 11 weeks. The benefit of each packet, for the purposes of this analysis can be monetarized at $20 per week or $10 per class--which is my certainty equivalent for being subject to the probability of my professor cold-calling me unprepared. Let's further suppose that the nominal benefits remain constant so long as I have a course packet with me and that the discount rate (because my economics class always uses this figure) is 5%.

NPV = (20-75)/(1.05)^0+(20)/(1.05)^1+(20-75)/(1.05)^2.... (20)/(1.05)^10
NPV = $-86.26 (don't you just love Excel?)

So, if I decided based solely on NPV, these course packets should be left rotting on the shelves while I spend my money on more productive functions such as rent or taxes or utilities (yes, this is sarcasm). Now, I could always attempt to complete my readings in the library using their reserves, but this is subject to the following: a) I have to be on campus and check the damn things out, a task in and of itself considering how lazy I can sometimes be; b) the strong likelihood that others have the same idea as me and will compete to check the readings out first; c) the limitation of only being able to check out the reserves for three hours at a time.

I could always do another cost-benefit analysis to see whether this option is preferable to the first, but I am too lazy to do that and I am always slightly skeptical when it comes to converting some things into dollar terms, such as time and my patience. Besides, Accounting teaches us that things that cannot be monetarized should not be included in calculations. And granted I did exactly what I just said not to do, rather than dig myself an even deeper grave, I shall cease right here.

The moral of this story is that course packets are not worth the money they cost. Going forward with this line of thinking, since the majority of the costs of these packets come from copyright fees, it stands to reason that the costs of copyrights (at least to me and anyone in a similar predicament) is not worth whatever benefits they provide. Creative commons anyone?