Naked Economics (4 page)

Similarly, we balance work and leisure. Grinding away ninety hours a week as an investment banker will generate a lot of income, but it will also leave less time to enjoy the goods that can be purchased with that income. My younger brother began his career as a management consultant with a salary that had at least one more digit than mine has now. On the other hand, he worked long and sometimes inflexible hours. One fall we both excitedly signed up for an evening film class taught by Roger Ebert. My brother proceeded to miss
every single class for thirteen weeks.

However large our paychecks, we can spend them on a staggering array of goods and services. When you bought this book, you implicitly decided not to spend that money somewhere else. (Even if you shoplifted the book, you could have stuffed a Stephen King novel in your jacket instead, which is flattering in its own kind of way.) Meanwhile, time is one of our most scarce resources. At the moment, you are reading instead of working, playing with the dog, applying to law school, shopping for groceries, or having sex. Life is about trade-offs, and so is economics.

In short, getting out of bed in the morning and making breakfast involves more complex decisions than the average game of chess. (Will that fried egg kill me in twenty-eight years?) How do we manage? The answer is that each of us implicitly weighs the costs and benefits of everything he or she does. An economist would say that we attempt to maximize utility given the resources at our disposal; my dad would say that we try to get the most bang for our buck. Bear in mind that the things that give us utility do not have to be material goods. If you are comparing two jobs—teaching junior high school math or marketing Camel cigarettes—the latter job would almost certainly pay more while the former job would offer greater “psychic benefits,” which is a fancy way of saying that at the end of the day you would feel better about what you do. That is a perfectly legitimate benefit to be compared against the cost of a smaller paycheck. In the end, some people choose to teach math and some people choose to market cigarettes.

Similarly, the concept of cost is far richer (pardon the pun) than the dollars and cents you hand over at the cash register. The real cost of something is what you must give up in order to get it, which is almost always more than just cash. There is nothing “free” about concert tickets if you have to stand in line in the rain for six hours to get them. Taking the bus for $1.50 may not be cheaper than taking a taxi for $7 if you are running late for a meeting with a peevish client who will pull a $50,000 account if you keep her waiting. Shopping at a discount store saves money but it usually costs time. I am a writer; I get paid based on what I produce. I could drive ninety miles to shop at an outlet in Kenosha, Wisconsin, to save $50 on a new pair of dress shoes. Or I could walk into Nordstrom on Michigan Avenue and buy the shoes while I am out for lunch. I generally choose the latter; the total cost is $225, fifteen minutes of my time, and some hectoring from my mother, who will invariably ask, “Why didn’t you drive to Kenosha?”

Every aspect of human behavior reacts to cost in some way. When the cost of something falls, it becomes more attractive to us. You can learn that by deriving a demand curve, or you can learn it by shopping the day after Christmas, when people snap up things that they weren’t willing to buy for a higher price several days earlier. Conversely, when the cost of something goes up, we use less of it. This is true of everything in life, even cigarettes and crack cocaine. Economists have calculated that a 10 percent decrease in the street price of cocaine eventually causes the number of adult cocaine users to grow by about 10 percent. Similarly, researchers estimated that the first proposed settlement between the tobacco industry and the states (rejected by the U.S. Senate in 1998) would have raised the price of a pack of cigarettes by 34 percent. In turn, that increase would have reduced the number of teenage smokers by a quarter, leading to 1.3 million fewer smoking-related premature deaths among the generation of Americans seventeen or younger at the time.
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Of course, society has already raised the cost of smoking in ways that have nothing to do with the price of a pack of cigarettes. Standing outside an office building when it is seventeen degrees outside is now part of the cost of smoking at work.

This broad view of cost can explain some very important social phenomena, one of which is the plummeting birth rate in the developed world. Having a child is more expensive than it was fifty years ago. This is not because it is more expensive to feed and clothe another little urchin around the house. If anything, those kinds of costs have gone down, because we have become far more productive at making basic consumer goods like food and clothing. Rather, the primary cost of raising a child today is the cost of the earnings forgone when a parent, still usually the mother, quits or cuts back on work to look after the child at home. Because women have better professional opportunities than ever before, it has grown more costly for them to leave the workforce. My neighbor was a neurologist until her second child was born, at which point she decided to stay home.
It’s expensive to quit being a neurologist.

Meanwhile, most of the economic benefits of having a large family have disappeared in the developed world. Young children no longer help out on the farm or provide extra income for the family (though they can be taught at a young age to fetch a beer from the refrigerator). We no longer need to have many children in order to ensure that some of them live through childhood or that we have enough dependents to provide for us in retirement. Even the most dour of economists would concede that we derive great pleasure from having children. The point is that it is now more expensive to have eleven of them than it used to be. The data speak to that point: The average American woman had 3.77 children in 1905; she now has 2.07—a 45 percent drop.
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There is a second powerful assumption underpinning all of economics: Firms—which can be anything from one guy selling hot dogs to a multinational corporation—attempt to maximize profits (the revenue earned by selling stuff minus the cost of producing it). In short, firms try to make as much money as possible. Hence, we have an answer to another of life’s burning questions: Why did the entrepreneur cross the road? Because he could make more money on the other side.

Firms take inputs—land, steel, knowledge, baseball stadiums, etc.—and combine them in a way that adds value. That process can be as simple as selling cheap umbrellas on a busy corner in New York City when it starts to rain (where do those guys come from?) or as complex as assembling Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner (a passenger jet that required 800,000 hours on Cray supercomputers just to design). A profitable firm is like a chef who brings home $30 worth of groceries and creates an $80 meal. She has used her talents to create something that is worth far more than the cost of the inputs. That is not always an easy thing to do. Firms must decide what to produce, how and where to produce it, how much to produce, and at what price to sell what they produce—all in the face of the same kinds of uncertainties that consumers deal with.

How? These are massively complex decisions. One powerful feature of a market economy is that it directs resources to their most productive use. Why doesn’t Brad Pitt sell automobile insurance? Because it would be an enormous waste of his unique talents. Yes, he is a charismatic guy who could probably sell more insurance policies than the average salesman. But he is also one of a handful of people in the world who can “open” a movie, meaning that millions of people around the world will go to see a film just because Brad Pitt is in it. That is money in the bank in the risky Hollywood movie business, so studios are willing to pay handsomely to put Brad Pitt in a starring role—about $30 million a film. Insurance agencies would also be willing to pay for the Pitt charisma—but more like $30,000. Brad Pitt will go where he is paid the most. And he will be paid the most in Hollywood because that is where he can add the most value.

Prices are like giant neon billboards that flash important information. At the beginning of the chapter, we asked how a restaurant on the Rue de Rivoli in Paris has just the right amount of tuna on most nights. It is all about prices. When patrons start ordering more of the sashimi appetizer, the restaurateur places a larger order with his fish wholesaler. If tuna is growing more popular at other restaurants, too, then the wholesale price will go up, meaning that fishermen somewhere in the Pacific will get paid more for their tuna catch than they used to. Some fishermen, recognizing that tuna now commands a premium over other kinds of fish, will start fishing for tuna instead of salmon. Meanwhile, some tuna fishermen will keep their boats in the water longer or switch to more expensive fishing methods that can now be justified by the higher price their catch will fetch. These guys don’t care about upscale diners in Paris. They care about the wholesale price of fish.

Money talks. Why are the pharmaceutical companies scouring the rain forests looking for plants with rare healing properties? Because the blockbuster drugs they may uncover earn staggering amounts of money. Other kinds of entrepreneurial activity take place on a smaller scale but are equally impressive in their own way. For several summers I coached a Little League baseball team near Cabrini Green, which is one of Chicago’s rougher neighborhoods. One of our team customs was to go out periodically for pizza, and one of our favorite spots was Chester’s, a small shack at the corner of Division and Sedgwick that was a testimony to the resiliency and resourcefulness of entrepreneurs. (It has since been demolished to make way for a new park as part of an aggressive development of Cabrini Green.) Chester’s made decent pizza and was always busy. Thus, it was basically an armed robbery waiting to happen. But that did not deter the management at Chester’s. They merely installed the same kind of bulletproof glass that one would find at the drive-up window of a bank. The customers placed their money on a small carousel, which was then rotated through a gap in the bulletproof glass. The pizza came out the other direction on the same carousel.

Profit opportunities attract firms like sharks to blood, even when bulletproof glass is required. We look for bold new ways to make money (creating the first reality TV show); failing that, we look to get into a business that is making huge profits for someone else (thereby creating the next twenty increasingly pathetic reality TV shows). All the while, we are using prices to gauge what consumers want. Of course, not every market is easy to enter. When LeBron James signed a three-year $60 million contract with the Cleveland Cavaliers, I thought to myself, “I need to play basketball for the Cleveland Cavaliers.” I would have gladly played for $58 million, or, if pressed, for $58,000. Several things precluded me from entering that market, however: (1) I’m five-ten; (2) I’m slow; and (3) when shooting under pressure, I have a tendency to miss the backboard. Why is LeBron James paid $20 million a year? Because nobody else can play like him. His unique talents create a barrier to entry for the rest of us. LeBron James is also the beneficiary of what University of Chicago labor economist Sherwin Rosen dubbed the “superstar” phenomenon. Small differences in talent tend to become magnified into huge differentials in pay as a market becomes very large, such as the audience for professional basketball. One need only be slightly better than the competition in order to gain a large (and profitable) share of that market.

In fact, LeBron’s salary is chump change compared to what talk-show host Rush Limbaugh is now paid. He recently signed an eight-year $400 million contract with Clear Channel Communications, the company that syndicates his radio program around the country. Is Rush that much better than other political windbags willing to offer their opinions? He doesn’t have to be. He need only be a tiny bit more interesting than the next best radio option at that time of day in order to attract a huge audience—20 million listeners daily. Nobody tunes into their second-favorite radio station, so it’s winner-take-all when it comes to listeners and the advertisers willing to pay big bucks to reach them.

Many markets have barriers that prevent new firms from entering, no matter how profitable making widgets may be. Sometimes there are physical or natural barriers. Truffles cost $500 a pound because they cannot be cultivated; they grow only in the wild and must be dug up by truffle-hunting pigs or dogs. Sometimes there are legal barriers to entry. Don’t try to sell sildenafil citrate on a street corner or you may end up in jail. This is not a drug that you snort or shoot up, nor is it illegal. It happens to be Viagra, and Pfizer holds the patent, which is a legal monopoly granted by the U.S. government. Economists may quibble over how long a patent should last or what kinds of innovations should be patentable, but most would agree that the entry barrier created by a patent is an important incentive for firms to make the kinds of investments that lead to new products. The political process creates entry barriers for dubious reasons, too. When the U.S. auto industry was facing intense competition from Japanese automakers in the 1980s, the American car companies had two basic options: (1) They could create better, cheaper, more fuel-efficient cars that consumers might want to buy; or (2) they could invest heavily in lobbyists who would persuade Congress to enact tariffs and quotas that would keep Japanese cars out of the market.

Some entry barriers are more subtle. The airline industry is far less competitive than it appears to be. You and some college friends could start a new airline relatively easily; the problem is that you wouldn’t be able to land your planes anywhere. There are a limited number of gate spaces available at most airports, and they tend to be controlled by the big guys. At Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, one of the world’s biggest and busiest airports, American and United control some 80 percent of all the gates.
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Or consider a different kind of entry barrier that has become highly relevant in the Internet age: network effects. The basic idea of a network effect is that the value of some goods rises with the number of other people using them. I don’t think Microsoft Word is particularly impressive software, but I own it anyway because I spend my days e-mailing documents to people who do like Word (or at least they use it). It would be very difficult to introduce a rival word-processing package—no matter how good the features or how low the price—as long as most of the world is using Word.