Last week, I sat down in our living room with Roya, our housekeeper's 17-year-old daughter. I had offered to help her study for her A-level exams, British-administered subject tests that count towards college admission. I had assumed I would tutor her in a subject in which I have a moderate natural facility or at least a basic working knowledge -- English, literature, history, writing. The softer the subject, the better, but I figured I could even pull it together to explain basic psychology or mathematical concepts that precede the Taylor series (this is where I topped out in both my high school and college calculus classes -- that bastard Taylor must relish the precise demarcation of my intellectual limits). "What can I help you with?" I asked. Roya reached into her navy blue backpack and pulled out The Cambridge A-Level Guide to Economic Principals.
I sustained a wave of mild panic. I have never taken a course that even tangentially addressed economic issues, and I am not far from thinking that a gross domestic product is toilet water or cooking grease or the sludge in a clogged drain. "I need help with this," she said, opening her book and pointing to a practice exam question involving trade, cost-benefit analysis, opportunity cost, and production possibility curves. For a moment, I considered apologizing to her profusely and saying that I just couldn't, in good conscience, help her with economics. But there was the problem that if I didn't, who would? I seemed to somehow be not just her best, but also her only, source for economics help.
I bit my lip and read the definitions of the relevant concepts in her textbook glossary. I decided that the opportunity cost of me helping her was quite low: If she already didn't understand these principles, and had been struggling with them for a few months, the worst-case scenario was that I would supplant her misconceptions with my own. This circumstance, along with the fact I wasn't charging for my services, meant that the cost-benefit analysis came out in favor of me continuing. And so, despite my miserable lack of qualifications, I spent the next two hours trying to explain these principles to her through a fabricated example involving a shoe factory, a polluted river, the Marriott corporation, and tax-hungry local government officials. She will be back on Monday.
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i recently became a "principal" product manager, which is different than the "principle" prod mgr, which my boss announced. does that mean i have a high production possibility frontier? or a low opportunity cost? that i have one more scruple than most? or maybe i'm only doing the job in 'principle'? i was hoping you could answer this from your recent understanding of economania.
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