Eat the Rich

So we do understand economics. We just think we don’t. And sometimes, unfortunately, we’re right.

Economists claim to study production, distribution, and consumption. But production requires actual skills and so can’t be taught by economics professors, because they’d have to know how to do something. And consumption is a very private matter. Consider the consumption of toilet paper, condoms, frozen pizza- for-one eaten straight out of the microwave in the middle of the night, and cigarettes in the carport when your spouse thinks you’ve stopped smoking. Therefore, economics tends to concentrate on distribution. When economists say “distribution,” however, they mean the distribution of everything, not just the distribution of such finished products as the pizzas and the microwave ovens to thaw them. There is also the distribution of raw materials—the seeds and fertilizer needed to grow the pizza toppings and the petrochemicals necessary to make the wood-grain plastic laminates decorating the ovens. Then there’s the distribution of labor—the effort required to freeze the pizza and round up all the microwaves. And the distribution of capital—the money required to buy plastic laminates and market pizzas that taste like them. There’s distribution of ideas, too. (Whose idea was it to put pineapple chunks on a pizza?) And there’s even distribution of space and time, which is what grocery and appliance stores really sell us. They gather the things we want in a place we can get to on a day we can get there and, voilà, a fattening midnight snack. All these things that get distributed are called “economic goods.” To an economist, anything is an economic good if it can be defined by the concept of “scarcity.” And the economist’s definition of scarcity is so broad that practically everything can be called scarce. Air is an economic good. If air gets polluted, we have to pay for catalytic converters and unleaded gasoline to make it breathable again. (And Woody Harrelson is reportedly opening an oxygen bar in Los Angeles.) Even if the air is free, we have limited lung capacity. The more so if we’ve been out in the carport huffing Camels. Air is an economic good for each of our bodies, and we hope that body is using the air economically—getting lots of O 2 into the bloodstream, or whatever, and not just making farts with it. From an economist’s point of view, everything is scarce except desires. Random sexual fantasies are not economic goods. But if we try to act on them, they rapidly become economic (or highly uneconomic, as the case may be).

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