Economics of Scarcity & Water Use in Pistachio Farming | Microeconomics | Trường Đại học Quốc tế, Đại học Quốc gia Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh
Up until now, Planet Money Summer School has looked at individual decisions. But it' s time to consider how our decisions affect everyone else. In Class 4: how do economists tally up the good and bad impacts we have on other people? We travel to Porterville, California, where a drought has dried up residents ' wells. There ' s water under their homes; they just can 't get to. Tài liệu được sưu tầm và soạn thảo dưới dạng file PDF để gửi tới các bạn cùng tham khảo, ôn tập đầy đủ kiến thức, chuẩn bị cho các buổi học thật tốt. Mời bạn đọc đón xem!
Môn: Microeconomics 635 tài liệu
Trường: Trường Đại học Quốc tế, Đại học Quốc gia Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh 1.9 K tài liệu
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Summer school 4: Scarity & Pistachios
Up until now, Planet Money Summer School has looked at individual
decisions. But it's time to consider how our decisions affect everyone else.
In Class 4: how do economists tally up the good and bad impacts we have on other people?
We travel to Porterville, California, where a drought has dried up
residents' wells. There's water under their homes; they just can't get to it.
Who can? Farmers growing almonds and pistachios, who can afford
to drill deeper and deeper wells. And with such a lucrative crop, they have
no incentive to share the water. But California is looking at ways to change that.
Our resident economists, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers from
the University of Michigan, say that there are only a few ways you can
manage a scarce resource. Government can step in and make rules about
who gets what. Or perhaps more efficiently, the government could tax the
resource and make it more expensive to take an extra sip of water from a
group well. There is also the concept of cap and trade, which limits what
you can use. But you can sell your share to someone else.
The options for water access during a drought are the same ones that
economists have talked about to combat global warming. You need to
change the incentives of individuals so they feel the cost of their effects on everyone else. Concepts: • Tragedy of the commons • Externalities • Scarcity • Cap and trade
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Summer school 4: Scarity & Pistachios
(SOUNDBITE OF BRICE MONTESSUIT AND CHARLES CASTE- BALLEREAU'S "LOST SITUATION") ROBERT SMITH, HOST:
Hello, and welcome to PLANET MONEY Summer School, the only
educational institution in the world that isn't freaking out right now. This is
class No. 4 - "Scarcity & Pistachios." I'm Robert Smith. Every Wednesday
till Labor Day, we are teaching you to look at the world through economic
eyes. And we're halfway done. Don't worry, no midterm, but there will be
a final exam and a high-quality certificate at the end that just might, in certain
lighting conditions, be mistaken for a diploma. You know who else has fancy
diplomas? Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers from the University of Michigan.
BETSEY STEVENSON: Hi. How are you today?
JUSTIN WOLFERS: I'm so excited for this episode.
SMITH: You say that for every episode.
WOLFERS: They're all about economics.
SMITH: I feel like our first three classes were all about making individual
decisions to maximize fun and profit. We looked at cost-benefit analyses,
markets and prices. And it was all nice and orderly, but this is the part of
the course where things are going to get messy.
WOLFERS: Yeah, the world's messy. Look; economics isn't just about you
making your decision. It's about how people interact when we put them
together in markets, when we have foreign countries, when we have
governments, when we have the messy reality that your choices can mess
things up for me. And that's what we're going to do in the next few episodes.
STEVENSON: 'Cause the reality in life is that, you know, the things you
do have impacts on other people. Think about something as simple as your
personal decision about whether you wear a mask in the middle of a
pandemic, right? That choice is not so much about you; it's actually about 2
Summer school 4: Scarity & Pistachios
the impact you're having on other people and whether you're spreading your germs to other people.
SMITH: There is a technical economics term for this, which is...
STEVENSON: Externalities.
SMITH: Externalities - how did they come up with that?
STEVENSON: So when I think about externalities, I think about side
effects. These are the side effects on people who are neither the buyers or
sellers in a transaction. They're just the bystanders - the innocent bystanders
who are going to have some side effects from your choices. Well, economists
think of them as external to that transaction, hence the term externalities.
SMITH: All right, so everyone should listen for this concept of externalities
- that's the impact a decision has on other people - as we listen to a PLANET
MONEY story from 2015 called "The Bottom Of The Well." I co-hosted it
with Stacey Vanek Smith. She traveled out to California's Central Valley
during this huge drought to meet people who were living without running
water in the city of Porterville.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
STACEY VANEK SMITH: The city has set up these kind of temporary
facilities, portable showers and sinks. I went and visited one. It was in the
parking lot of a church. And they kind of look like an airplane bathroom.
They had little benches and showerheads and a curtain. And out in the
blazing hot afternoon sun were rows of sinks with mirrors. And people come
there in the morning and shave before work. It was really grim. And while I
was walking around, a car pulled up and Karen Hendrickson (ph) rolled her window down.
So what were you hoping to get today?
KAREN HENDRICKSON: Water, today, for our house - the drinking
water - because our well is dry, so we come here for support on drinking water.
VANEK SMITH: How long ago did your well go dry? 3
Summer school 4: Scarity & Pistachios
HENDRICKSON: It's been a year already.
VANEK SMITH: Whoa.
HENDRICKSON: Yeah, it's been a year.
VANEK SMITH: How often do you come here?
HENDRICKSON: At least - what? - a couple times a week - me and my
daughter. She comes, and then I come because we drink a lot of water - a lot.
VANEK SMITH: Karen asked the security guard, do you have any water
today? The security guard says, no, we're out, got to come back tomorrow.
SMITH: The thing that's heartbreaking about all of this is that there is
actually water still left in the valley. There is water literally below Karen's
home. There's a giant aquifer, and Karen used to tap into it with her well.
But the level is getting lower and lower and lower, so she and her neighbors
can't reach it anymore. It's like this race to get the water. Karen and the
people here lost out on the race.
VANEK SMITH: But there are people still getting this water, people who
are still in this race. Not that far away from Karen's house, you see it - acres
and acres of lush farmland, corn, cotton, tomatoes, pistachio trees, walnuts,
almonds. This is where Karen's water went.
SMITH: Today on PLANET MONEY Summer School, we'll look at the
screwed-up economics of drought. Why is it so lucrative to use up more and
more of a scarce resource - in this case, water? But the lesson applies to just
about everything in the world. And if you think about externalities, can you
set up a system where everyone gets what they need?
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
VANEK SMITH: Mark Watte farms 3,000 acres in California's Central
Valley. And Mark is a very energetic guy, super organized. He likes to tape
lists to the steering wheel of his truck.
So is that a to-do list on your steering wheel?
MARK WATTE: It is. It is. Yeah, it certainly is. 4
Summer school 4: Scarity & Pistachios
VANEK SMITH: We're in Mark's truck, and we're driving across his farm.
His fields stretch as far as the eye can see. There's beautiful black-eyed peas
and corn and pistachio trees, and it's incredibly lush and green. And the
reason for this is that Mark's farm sits on top of that aquifer, the same aquifer
that Karen's house well used to tap.
SMITH: Except he's better at getting to the water.
VANEK SMITH: He is better at getting to the water, but it's getting harder
and harder, even for Mark. The level of the aquifer has been dropping really
fast. It's been dropping 10 feet a week.
SMITH: Which is amazing - 10 feet a week.
VANEK SMITH: Ten feet a week. In fact, half of the wells on his 3,000
acres have dried up. He shows me one.
WATTE: That should be producing water. It's not. Let's see if there's any
water in it. So this is a good sound. You'll like this.
VANEK SMITH: Mark picks a rock up off the ground and he throws it into
the well, just a little pipe sticking out of the ground. He was right. I liked the sound.
(SOUNDBITE OF ROCK HITTING PIPE) WATTE: Water.
VANEK SMITH: Oh, is that - was there water?
WATTE: That was water, yeah. Yeah, there's water down there, but the
pump that was here wouldn't reach that water anymore. We have to deepen it.
VANEK SMITH: Mark is deepening wells as fast as he can. And he's also
putting in new wells. He's put in eight at a cost of around $2 million. And
the reason for this is all around us - pistachio trees. There are little baby
ones he's just planted. They're, like, up to your hip, tied to these little stakes. 5
Summer school 4: Scarity & Pistachios
And there are bigger ones in the next field with big clusters of pistachios almost ready to pick. These are the pistachios?
WATTE: Yep. Yeah, they are. There you can see it's about half developed.
VANEK SMITH: It's so green.
These little pistachios are very thirsty. It takes almost a gallon of water to
grow one pistachio and a gallon of water to grow an almond. Nut trees are
some of the thirstiest crops around. And yet, here we are in the middle of a
drought, and Mark is planting pistachio trees as fast as he can.
Why are you planting so many new trees right now?
WATTE: We just think it's - financially, it's the right decision to make. Once
they get up into production, we hope to make good money.
VANEK SMITH: So they're - are they pretty profitable, pistachios?
WATTE: Extremely profitable today. I mean, wildly profitable.
VANEK SMITH: Really? WATTE: Yes.
VANEK SMITH: Actually, 10 times more profitable than most other crops.
For pistachios, Mark can make $10,000 an acre - for most other crops, $1,000 an acre.
SMITH: The reason for this is both supply and demand. The demand part
is that people are eating more nuts. People in China and India are
discovering them, and so there's a much bigger market for nuts. But the
supply side is also important. The reason why they can make so much
money off of these crops is because of the drought. The drought has made
pistachios and almonds harder to grow - rarer. And as a result, the price has naturally shot up.
VANEK SMITH: So everyone is planting them. And when you drive
through California's Central Valley, it's striking. All of the fields are these
new trees. Farmers are ripping out their old crops and putting in nut trees. 6
Summer school 4: Scarity & Pistachios
SMITH: And they've become so profitable, you hear these stories about
hedge funds and big banks buying California farmland and planting almond
and pistachio trees because hedge funds and banks have plenty of cash
upfront to drill these really deep wells, tap the aquifer, get the water first.
And the payoff for them could be huge.
VANEK SMITH: And this is being reinforced by the market right now
because crops that do well in droughts, they do not bring in that much
money. And if you're running a farm and spending hundreds of thousands
of dollars to drill new wells, you are not going to make that money back
planting drought-friendly crops. I ran this by Mark Watte, pistachio farmer.
I mean, should you be planting something like flaxseed or safflower here instead of pistachio trees?
WATTE: Oh, I - should I be planting it? I don't know. I mean, we're trying to make money here.
SMITH: Economists have a term for this race for a scarce resource, this
dilemma, and you've probably heard it, even if you haven't taken an
economics class. It's called the tragedy of the commons. If you have a shared
resource - say, a meadow where your cows graze or an underground lake -
people will use as much of it as they can. They will use a public resource until it's gone.
VANEK SMITH: And the reason that they call this a tragedy is not that
there are any bad guys in the scenario. It's that, actually, everybody is acting
rationally. It's just that what is good for the individual and what is good for
the group are totally different. Take Mark Watte, the pistachio farmer. If he
were to cut back his water use, he would just lose out. His neighbors would
use the water. Hedge funds would use the water. They would make the
$10,000 an acre, and he would be stuck with a bunch of safflower that's not worth very much.
SMITH: Yeah, so Mark keeps drilling deeper. And his neighbors look at
that, and they dril deeper, too. And this race, this race we're talking about, becomes frantic. 7
Summer school 4: Scarity & Pistachios
VANEK SMITH: And to stay in this race, you've got to pick up the phone
and call somebody like Steve Arthur.
So do you mind reading the back of your truck?
STEVE ARTHUR: Yeah. It just says Arthur & Orum Well Drilling, Fresno - we leave you wet.
VANEK SMITH: (Laughter) That's amazing.
That's amazing is always what I say when I don't know what to say.
SMITH: (Laughter) I can understand that.
VANEK SMITH: Steve Arthur runs one of the biggest drilling companies
in the area. And he actually mostly works out of this truck. He drives it from
drill site to drill site all day.
ARTHUR: I get 40 or 50 calls a day, easy. I can't even keep track of what
the office gets. All the farmers are completely running out of water.
VANEK SMITH: So how long is a wait to get a well drilled?
ARTHUR: Realistically, at least a year.
VANEK SMITH: Wells around here used to be about 200 feet deep. But
these days, Steve is drilling wells that are as much as 2,000 feet deep. His
company has started buying equipment off of oil drilling companies, like
fracking companies, in order to get deep enough to get to the water.
ARTHUR: Years ago, nobody had equipment in the area to go that deep.
And modern technology's taking care of that now. So we started drilling
deeper up there, and that's when we found aquifers nobody had ever touched.
SMITH: And you know how this ends. You go deeper and deeper. You
take more and more water out of an aquifer, eventually, it is going to go
away. And when we talked to the water scientist, we asked him how much
is left at this pace. And he said maybe 50 years - 50 years' worth of water
in the aquifer - at the outside, a hundred years. 8
Summer school 4: Scarity & Pistachios
VANEK SMITH: And when I asked him what would happen when the
water ran out, what that would look like, he actually referenced the movie "Mad Max."
SMITH: As in people driving around the desert fighting each other for water.
VANEK SMITH: Thunderdome, yeah.
SMITH: Because that is one of the logical ways that this ends. The water
goes away. The wel s go dry. And all of a sudden, no one grows pistachios
anymore. No one grows anything anymore. We're talking about functionally
a dust bowl happening in the Central Valley.
VANEK SMITH: Another ending could be regulation. The government
steps in and says, hey, you have to limit your water use; you can only drill
this deep. But so far, the state has been reluctant to do that.
SMITH: There is one other option, though, one solution to the tragedy of
the commons. In fact, there's an economist named Elinor Ostrom. We've
talked about her here before on PLANET MONEY. She won a Nobel Prize
for her work on the tragedy of the commons in 2009. And her work showed
that sometimes this does not end badly, and sometimes it doesn't end in the
government coming in, putting all these rules and regulations in place. She
said that people can come together and work out a solution for themselves.
They can basically put the interests of their group ahead of their immediate
interests, sort of decide not to race.
VANEK SMITH: But this is not easy, as you can imagine, because,
basically, you have to convince people to give up their personal, short-term
interests for the long-term interests of the group. And this is not exactly how
humans are built. This is not what we tend to do naturally. But I did manage
to find some people who are trying it north of Mark Watte's pistachio farm in a town near Sacramento.
GEORGE HARTMANN: Hi. My name is George Hartmann (ph). I'm an
attorney, lawyer. In Texas, they call us liars. 9
Summer school 4: Scarity & Pistachios
VANEK SMITH: George has been working with farmers in this area his
whole career. And when he looked around, he saw the same thing was
happening there as was happening down South. The community was
running out of water. Everyone was using as much as they could as fast as
they could. And he thought to himself, this race that's happening is going
to end badly. We should get together and try to stop it because sooner or
later, the government will come in and limit our water use. We don't know
when, and we don't know how much.
So he got a group of farmers together - about 500 of them - in Stockton,
Calif., and he said, listen; I have a proposal. Why don't we voluntarily cut
our water use by 25%? And if we do that, the government has said it will
not come in later and cut our water.
HARTMANN: This way, you get certainty. You know what you can do. You can plan your survival.
SMITH: Which must've been hard for the farmers there because in this
community, water is money. Water means crops. Crops mean money. And
he's basically coming in and saying to them, I want you to take a 25% pay cut.
VANEK SMITH: And a lot of the farmers really didn't want to do that.
HARTMANN: There were a lot of folks who thought it was extortion. They didn't like it.
VANEK SMITH: But in the end, half of the farmers signed up to do this,
and Paula De Snayer (ph) was one of them.
PAULA DE SNAYER: It's costly and it's not ideal 'cause this is your livelihood.
VANEK SMITH: Paula owns a dairy farm in Lodi, Calif., and she grows a
lot of corn for her cows - or her girls, as she calls them. Using 25% less
water will mean Paula will have to buy a lot of the food for her cows, and
that is a lot more expensive. And that means the best Paula is going to be
able to do this year is break even. 10
Summer school 4: Scarity & Pistachios
But Paula took the deal because she's been hearing all of these horror stories
about her neighbors getting their water cut off entirely - as in the government
coming in and saying, no more water for you. And the farmers are stuck.
The crops are halfway grown. They have no water to finish them. Still, the decision weighs on her.
DE SNAYER: You want to do your part, but you want to make - I hope
that everyone is doing their part (laughter) 'cause it is - it is a financial burden.
SMITH: You can hear her anxiety in that laugh because this particular
solution to the tragedy of the commons can be brutal. If it turns out that the
government does not put any new rules in place, that the government does
not make you cut back on your water, then you've just given up your profits
for nothing. Like, you will feel like a chump.
VANEK SMITH: The farmers started cutting back last month, and so far,
people seem to be sticking to it. And it's gotten a lot of people asking, could
this work in other parts of California? Is this possibly a solution to the
drought? I put this question to Mark Watte, the pistachio farmer with the
dry wells. I asked if farmers in his area might come together in the same way.
Would something like that work here if, like, everybody got together and agreed to use less?
WATTE: You mean as far as don't pump as much or something like that? Yeah.
VANEK SMITH: Yeah.
WATTE: No, I don't - I don't see that. I just - no, I don't see that.
VANEK SMITH: How come?
WATTE: I don't know. I just - a group of - No. 1, you couldn't get
consensus. If you had only five farmers, I don't think you could get
consensus. If you've got 500 farmers, I know you couldn't get consensus.
So I just don't think it would be a practical thing to try. I mean, right now,
you know, you just - there is water down there, and you've got haves and 11
Summer school 4: Scarity & Pistachios
have-nots, and the haves I don't think will be in a mood to share with the have-nots, so yeah.
VANEK SMITH: Mark drove me to one of his wells that is just about to go dry.
(SOUNDBITE OF MACHINE WHIRRING)
WATTE: Well, this is a pump that has - was put into service in 1946. It has
faithfully produced water. And I expect a week from now, it will not be
functioning anymore and it'll be dry. So it's just another one that is going to
go by the wayside here quickly.
VANEK SMITH: What does it feel like to see it doing that?
WATTE: I purposely don't drive by it. And when I do, I look the other way.
VANEK SMITH: As I was driving around the farm with Mark, I kept asking
him over and over why he's doing what he's doing, why he keeps drilling
deeper and deeper wells and why he keeps, at the same time, planting crops
that need so much water. What is the future here? And he told me there is
still a lot of water left in this aquifer and he thinks things will turn around.
He kept telling me, it's going to rain next year, it's going to rain next year. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SMITH: That was Stacey Vanek Smith from back in 2015. In the years
since we first aired this episode, a new California law has gone into effect
that requires communities to monitor the level of the groundwater and to
come up with individual plans to make sure that they're not taking more
water out than the rain is putting back in.
When we return, we'll bring in the Summer School economists to talk about
the best ways to make sure the Californians are actually sharing the water,
and they'll show us how the economics of externalities just might save the world. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SMITH: Back with us are our economists-in-residence this summer, Betsey
Stevenson and Justin Wolfers from the University of Michigan. And, Betsey, 12
Summer school 4: Scarity & Pistachios
you use this episode in one of your classes, in one of your microeconomics classes.
STEVENSON: I do. It is a great episode because I want to get students to
think about the kind of problems that we face when we're all trying to share
a common resource. This problem comes from a specific kind of class of
goods where they are rival. That means that if you use all the water, there's
no water left for me, but it's hard for me to prevent you from taking the
water. It's what economists call nonexcludable.
SMITH: So maybe we should just go through the different kinds of solutions
as economists think of them. I mean, the one that would work is that if
everyone just suddenly realized that they were sharing a common resource
and everybody just used less. The people in the story seemed to think that
that is just not a possible solution.
WOLFERS: It would be good if everyone was nice and took account of their
effects on everyone else, and they might to some extent. But once everyone
else is leaving the water behind, you've got to bet someone out there is
going to think - you know what? - I could make a whole bunch more money
if I grew more pistachios and just took a little bit more water, and that's going to be the problem.
SMITH: And so does the government have to step in?
WOLFERS: Something's got to happen.
SMITH: Something's got to happen.
WOLFERS: And the question is the who and the how. The most obvious
answers I think do involve the government. But there's a different form of
government, which is - and we talked about it in the episode. They could
form, in a sense, their own government, a local association that gets the
local pistachio growers together and says, let's use this valuable resource a
little more carefully and a little more cleverly.
STEVENSON: But what's motivating the coordination is the threat of
government regulation if they don't agree to coordinate. So they know that
if they, you know, just can't agree, that then they're going to be bound by 13
Summer school 4: Scarity & Pistachios
some other regulation. So it does come down to there needing to be
something that is policy-like.
SMITH: And in this episode, we talked about the great economist Elinor
Ostrom and the tragedy of the commons. And she came up with some
theories about how people can work together to solve the tragedy of the
commons. But there are limitations to this, right? Like, we sort of know now
that there are limits to when communities can actually work out a solution.
WOLFERS: So it's going to be a lot easier to get a group of people together
to come to some agreement if there's a smaller number of them, if they
have aligned interests and, also, if I can watch what you're doing and I can
see that you're abiding by the agreement and you see that I'm abiding by
the agreement. That might work well in something like a family. It might
work well in a business improvement district.
But some of the bigger issues, I think, of today's episode is a metaphor for
the global warming debate. There, the people who are being harmed by
pollution are not just seven people in a local area and not just 8 billion
people on planet Earth, but today's generation and future generations. And
how you get all those people in a room to cooperate, including the unborn, is obviously impossible.
SMITH: So what can you do here, either for California's water problem or
for global warming? I know this has been a huge focus of economics over the last decade or so.
WOLFERS: So when economists look at things, they see two options. First, there's prices.
STEVENSON: And then there's quantities.
WOLFERS: So let's take prices. The problem in California is the price of
water is free. So when something is free, the pistachio farmers are just going
to use it out the wazoo. They're going to overconsume.
SMITH: Yeah, it's just a matter of how deep they can go and what the
technology is rather than thinking about, oh, is it worth it for me to take an
extra gallon of water compared to what I get for my pistachio. 14
Summer school 4: Scarity & Pistachios
WOLFERS: Yeah. So if we want them to do a little less, what we do is
make them pay for it. So raise the price of water; they're going to use less
of it. In the global warming context, the same idea is we should impose a
carbon tax, making it expensive to pollute. When you make something
expensive, people do less of it.
STEVENSON: So the second idea is to think about limiting the quantity,
so we could say there's only so much water you should take out of the
ground. For instance, in the episode, they talk about how a new regulation
came in place that limited how much you could pull out was going to be a
function of how much rain had put in so that you'd preserve the water
source. So you can limit the quantity. We - also, in the global warming
context, we've seen a lot of countries propose capping the amount of
pollution that can be emitted by factories. Now, the problems with these
quantity regulations is there can be some real distributional issues.
SMITH: What do you mean by distributional issues?
STEVENSON: So if we're going to set the amount of water you can pull
out, then we might have the government saying, this is how much water the
pistachio farmer can have; this is how much water the grandmother who
has the twins in her home can have. But even if we're going to limit the
quantity of water that's used, we still want the water to go to the person
who's going to use it most efficiently, most effectively, who values it the
most. And so if we say that this is the maximum amount of water we want pulled out of the ground...
WOLFERS: That's the cap.
STEVENSON: ...That's the cap, we then want to make it easy for people
to trade. Maybe Mark, the pistachio farmer, gets his allocation of water and
decides, you know, I'd be better off selling this water to the farmer down the
road and planting those alfalfa sprouts after all, instead of planting these
heavy water-consuming pistachios.
WOLFERS: So you put those two words together that Betsey just said - cap
the quantity and allow people to trade - and you get cap and trade, which is
what people have proposed to deal with global warming. 15
Summer school 4: Scarity & Pistachios
STEVENSON: Yeah. So you hear that often talked about in the pollution
context. Why cap and trade? Well, some factories can reduce pollution a lot
more efficiently than other factories can. Some countries can reduce
pollution a lot more efficiently than other countries can. If we allow trade,
then we can actually get the most bang for our buck in terms of reducing pollution.
WOLFERS: I teach a lot of young people. And a lot of young people feel
overwhelmed by the problem of global warming. They feel it's too big and
too difficult. And I think learning the economics about it turns that on its
head. We economists understand what causes global warming. It's people
taking actions without accounting for the effects on others. We know how
to solve it. We have all the tools we need to defeat global warming. All we
need now is the political will to implement it.
SMITH: All right, that is all we have time for in today's class, but I did want
to go over some vocabulary words. Externality - that is the effect that your
decisions have on other people. And we talked about two ways in which the
government can help allocate a scarce resource, one through taxing that
resource and the other through actually putting physical limits on the
resource and cap and trade. Do you have an assignment for us today, Professors?
WOLFERS: I want our listeners to, as they go through their day, try and
identify a common resource that they see in their lives and either ask
themselves whether it's being overconsumed or, alternatively, what it is
that's preventing people from overconsuming it.
SMITH: Thank you both very much. See you next week.
WOLFERS: I'm so excited. Wait; I always say that.
SMITH: We're going to do taxes next week...
STEVENSON: I love taxes.
SMITH: ...Or at least a particular form of taxes known as tariffs. That's next
Wednesday on PLANET MONEY Summer School. 16
Summer school 4: Scarity & Pistachios
(SOUNDBITE OF BRICE MONTESSUIT AND CHARLES CASTE- BALLEREAU'S "LOST SITUATION")
SMITH: Let us know what you came up with from our assignment this
week. Analyze a common resource you share with your neighbors and send
it to planetmoney@npr.org. Or you can find us on Facebook, Instagram,
Twitter and TikTok. We're @planetmoney. By the way, you've all been
doing a great job with your assignments. I just haven't graded them all yet. It's hard being a teacher.
Today's class was produced by Lauren Hodges, with help from Darian
Woods and Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. Sound design from Isaac Rodrigues (ph).
It was edited by Alex Goldmark. Betsey Stenvenson and Justin Wolfers are
professors of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan.
Plus, they're working on a new audio course, Think Like an Economist, on the Himalaya app.
Enjoy your midterm break, everyone. We will be back with Summer School
No. 5 next week, when we will tax Santa Claus. I'm Robert Smith. This is NPR. Thanks for listening. Assignment:
What is a resource that you share with your family or neighbors? Is it
being over-consumed? And if not, what is preventing people from over-
consuming it? Tell us about it. #PMSummerSchool
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and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative
record of NPR’s programming is the audio record. 17
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