The opportunity cost of motherhood

Steven Landsburg reviews a study on the price of motherhood: On average, Miller has found in a new paper, a woman in her 20s will increase her lifetime earnings by 10 percent if she delays the birth of her first child by a year. Part of that is because she’ll earn higher wages—about 3 percent [...]

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In the news: Price controls

In LA Times today: Los Angeles has rent control on all apartments built before Oct. 1, 1978, and on mobile home parks whose operating permits were issued before Feb. 10, 1986. … Generally, the laws allow landlords to raise rents by a limited amount — in many jurisdictions by the amount of the consumer price [...]

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Opportunity costs: Biofuels vs. food?

From a May/June 2007 Foreign Affairs article, “How Biofuels Could Starve the Poor“: The push for ethanol and other biofuels has spawned an industry that depends on billions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies, and not only in the United States…The industry’s growth has meant that a larger and larger share of corn production is being [...]

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For my students

Two things. If you are in my discussion sections and haven’t received an e-mail from me, please drop me an e-mail so that I can update my mailing list. Also, please fill in the following survey before next Thursday.

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Robert Frost, ECON 203 instructor?

Surely not. But Robert Frost’s famous poem, “The Road Not Taken”, is a beautiful example of a traveler, who must trade off one road with another, weighing in the opportunity cost of his decision: The Road Not Taken TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one [...]

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On eating cakes, buying shoes, and a good reason not to whack your boss…

Scarcity creates the need for trade-offs — “you can’t have the cake and eat it too!”. The need for trade-offs creates opportunity costs. Modern microeconomics is all about understanding how people weigh in their opportunity costs, from which they derive the tool of marginal analysis. For those interested in a non-mathematical overview of microeconomics, I [...]

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