Featured Post

BFRC

I am posting this as a benchmark, not because I think I'm playing very well yet.  The idea would be post a video every month for a ye...

Tuesday, October 9, 2018

A Flaw in the Ointment

The concept of "opportunity cost" seems flawed because it assumes that we can know what is being lost. It works in limited contexts where we can know exactly what is given up, but if we take the concept of time, for example, the opportunity cost of an hour could be expressed as endlessly variable possibilities. Even with a limited gamut of possibilities, say, reading, there are hundreds of thousands of books that I could reading instead of the one I am reading. I cannot stop myself and consider whether I should be listening to another piece of music, because there is no way of saying that anyone could ever choose wisely enough among competing musics.

I probably don't understand the concept well enough yet, not being an economist.

1 comment:

Leslie B. said...

You don't know what you are missing, or what you may get, yes.

I shouldn't have gotten involved in inviting this speaker, perhaps, but I'll make friends with him and I've gotten the University president to introduce him so I may make friends with him, as well. That's just my example from today. Things go in good and bad ways. Rules of thumb are useful but as my Arabic teacher said, "You have guiding lines, but sometimes they are misleading lines." Rules of thumb are only rules of thumb and you can't expect to use them to control [nature, or whatever]. Hm.