I try not to think about the fact that college was almost four decades ago. Like many, so much of what I learned in Athens occurred outside the classroom yet occasional lessons from coursework appear as flashbacks in reaction to the modern world’s events all these years later.

My degrees, a B.B.A. from UGA and later a Master’s from Georgia State are in Economics. There’s currently an online debate about who gets to call themselves (and demand others refer to them as) an Economist. 

I don’t, and I never have. I’ve been a banker, a builder, held a finance role for a large auto dealership group, helped manage a phone system for the U.S. Army Reserve, sold a similar system/program to NASA, and more recently have been a consultant, writer, publisher, and lobbyist.

For a brief while in all those years I was also an adjunct professor of Economics and Small Business. It was one of the endeavors I probably enjoyed the most. As someone trained in economics, I also understood the concept of opportunity cost. 

Life decisions aren’t all about what makes you the happiest, unfortunately. Fulfillment and enjoyment are certainly important. 

Money isn’t everything, either. I’ve turned down job opportunities and clients that would have paid very well. Each of those had high costs on my time, personal life, and/or morals and ethics. 

Big life decisions have major opportunity costs. It’s somewhat similar to the 1970’s game show “Let’s Make A Deal”. When you pick one door, you give up what is behind others. This is opportunity cost.

The problem with economics is few wish to study it or make an effort to understand it. The reaction to the subject, to quote one of my sisters, is “Ewwwww”.  

Yet many still wish to use the economic signals we get every day not just for their own choices, but for others. Many a political argument ends after making an often errant point with “it’s just Econ 101”.

The problem with this line of reasoning is that foundational classes in Economics are meat to teach the most basic of concepts. There are many assumptions one must make to have the elemental “Marshallian Cross” lines of supply and demand actually work that some can miss why signals sometimes fail in the real world.  

It’s hard to blame the general public for this when they have so much help in misunderstanding the complexities of economic action and reaction. Few journalists have even a foundational course in Econ. Many of their stories begin with good intentions to inform, but their own industry’s failures to understand markets and market reaction lead to poor reporting and thus greater public misunderstanding.

No better example of this is the coverage of the Federal Reserve setting a benchmark for short term interest rates. The Fed controls short term rates by buying and selling bonds to achieve a relatively stable price and thus interest rate on these instruments.  

Too often the reporting of these decisions goes something like “The Fed raised interest rates today, so expect the cost of your mortgage to go up.”  The problem is, mortgage rates are long term rates, which the market sets generally based on long term inflation fears. Most of the time, a fed decision to raise or lower rates is to fight inflation, and thus the reaction between long and short term rates is like a see-saw.  

Because raising short term rates shows the Fed is fighting inflation, mortgage rates will often actually come down when “interest rates are raised”.  Yet it’s often reported as the opposite cause and effect.

Then there are politicians and their consultants. They want you to believe the slogans they put on bumper stickers which come from partisan dogma are long standing economic treatises. 

Too many conservatives believe every time you cut taxes you get an increase in revenue. If this were true, we would have infinite revenues just by eliminating taxes.  That’s what happens if you just keep cutting according to this bumper sticker theory. 

Too many progressives believe the government can spend its way into prosperity, even if it means confiscating the wealth of the prosperous. The people who want to take profits out of our system don’t seem to understand that our entire tax system is based on taking a percentage of profits – while leaving an incentive for private citizens to take risks and make profits so that they can keep at least some of it.

Each side comes loaded with their own out of context economic headlines to “prove their points”, not unlike an atheist quoting out of context scripture to assert moral high ground. We are at this point of the campaign cycle and on the precipice of a Presidential race where these examples abound.

They have me harkening back not to one of my Economics courses, but to my intro to Statistics taught by Dr. Whitten at UGA in the 1980’s.  Beware, she cautioned at the beginning of the course, of what you’re about to learn. In this world, there are lies, damned lies, and then there are statistics.