EWOT for Week 5

Mike Pascutoi

I am new to these assignments, so it’s hard for me to be able to do this while so many of my classmates are so easily able to do these in half the time it is taking me to even think of a concept.  After spending three days sitting in my lounge studying and working on catching up with Econ, I was asked by a couple of my friends if I was going home for Fall Break, to which I said that although I wanted to, it was a far better idea to stay on campus and catch up on work.  Most of them scoffed at the idea, saying that since it was after midterms, homework and studying could wait.  I countered by saying that since I can go home any time (since I live ten minutes from my dorm), coming home for a four-day weekend meant less to me.  Friday, as all my friends were going home and I was stuck in the lounge, hungry and annoyed at not being able to eat during Yom Kippur, I realized that my current situation related to what we had examined in class on Monday and Wednesday: opportunity costs and relative value.

I chose not to go home because, essentially, I realized that the opportunity cost of going home rather than studying was greater than I was willing to spend.  The cost of going home, in my opinion, was 15-20 hours less spent on Econ, Music Theory, and Philosophy, and I valued those hours far more than my friends who were going home and knew they were taking the weekend off from schoolwork.

I also realized that my friends were going home because they valued the idea far more, since they have less chances to do so than I do.  In some cases, I knew that they also valued schoolwork less than seeing their parents due to their lack of focus in college to begin with.  Either way, I realized that as much as I loved them, my value of seeing them was diminished by my easy ability to see them.  

Furthermore, this situation made me think of the water-diamond paradox: if my hours to study were not limited, and I had the option of seeing my parents (which I love) or studying more (can’t honestly say I enjoy that), the obvious option would be to pick the option I value more.  However, my limited hours of free time required me to pick the option that had the greatest amount of marginal value per hour, despite the opportunity cost it had.