MONEY ISN'T EVERYTHING T he media give us stories of crises but they also give us more than that. Our sense of community is eroded by the very stories that cause us to retreat into our walled cities or walled versions of the "group." Our way of seeing has become blinded by the almighty dollar. We accept expressions of the quality of our lives in terms of possessions, arti- facts, and money. Once we start using the language of the market to describe our nonmarket, social activities, it becomes easier and easier for us to trade off market, economic goods against nonmarket, social ones. When we ask ourselves whether we can "afford" to spend an evening with friends instead of finishing a legal brief or cultivating a new client, we are implicitly puffing a price on our friendship. How else, after all, can we begin to answer the question? When teaching economics, the single concept that is most difficult to convey is the concept of opportunity cost. The opportunity cost of some action is the gain that we would realize by doing something else. If working on a legal brief at night instead of being with friends would have gotten us a $500 bonus, then that $500 bonus forgone is the opportunity cost of our decision to be with friends. What the concept of opportunity cost does is put a literal price on everything we do. We could always work a little harder or a little longer. The "cost" for not doing so might be promotion, partner- ship in the firm, or even keeping our job at all. When we think in terms
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