The Supply And Demand Game

I play it in each class I teach. A former colleague taught it to me many years ago. As far as I know, I use the game invented by Edward Chamberlin and refined by Vernon Smith. Click here to see the Lessons From the Supply and Demand Game (a couple of people have emailed me about it recently).

How Much Do Environmental Regulations Cost?

See the interesting post at Freakonomics. It mentions a paper by Michael Greenstone, John List, and Chad Syverson. Here is the abstract:

"The economic costs of environmental regulations have been widely debated since the U.S. began to restrict pollution emissions more than four decades ago. Using detailed production data from nearly 1.2 million plant observations drawn from the 1972-1993 Annual Survey of Manufactures, we estimate the effects of air quality regulations on manufacturing plants’ total factor productivity (TFP) levels. We find that among surviving polluting plants, stricter air quality regulations are associated with a roughly 2.6 percent decline in TFP. The regulations governing ozone have particularly large negative effects on productivity, though effects are also evident among particulates and sulfur dioxide emitters. Carbon monoxide regulations, on the other hand, appear to increase measured TFP, especially among refineries. The application of corrections for the confounding of price increases and output declines and sample selection on survival produce a 4.8 percent estimated decline in TFP for polluting plants in regulated areas. This corresponds to an annual economic cost from the regulation of manufacturing plants of roughly $21 billion, about 8.8 percent of manufacturing sector profits in this period."

Here is something I report in my microeconomics class:

"Thomas Hopkins at the Rochester Institute of Technology determined that the cost of all regulations over each year is about 8% of national income. The total cost from compliance and administration of both Economic and Social regulation, including state, local and federal levels, is more than $1 trillion annually (From the book Economics Today by Roger LeRoy Miller, 15e)"

Are "Soft" Skills Related To Unemployment?

See Hard Unemployment Truths About 'Soft' Skills by NICK SCHULZ in the WSJ. Excerpts:

"One of the [manufacturing] representatives looked sheepishly around the room and responded: "To be perfectly honest . . . we have a hard time finding people [workers] who can pass the drug test."

"... simply finding someone who could properly answer the telephone was sometimes a challenge."

"More than 600,000 jobs in manufacturing went unfilled in 2011 due to a skills shortage,..."

"...evidence suggests that many employers would be happy just to find job applicants who have the sort of "soft" skills that used to be almost taken for granted."

"...nearly 20% of employers cited a lack of soft skills as a key reason they couldn't hire needed employees. "Interpersonal skills and enthusiasm/motivation" were among the most commonly identified soft skills that employers found lacking. Employers also mention a lack of elementary command of the English language."

"More than half of the organizations surveyed reported that simple grammar and spelling were the top "basic" skills among older workers that are not readily present among younger workers. The SHRM/AARP survey also found that "professionalism" or "work ethic" is the top "applied" skill that younger workers lack."

"...manufacturers were finding it harder to find punctual, reliable workers today than in 2007..."

"Many people lack what the writer R.R. Reno has called "forms of social discipline" that are indispensable components of a person's human capital and that are needed for economic success."

How Did Astronauts Of The 60s "Purchase" Life Insurance?

See Neil Armstrong Couldn't Afford Life Insurance, So He Used a Creative Way to Provide for His Family If He Died. Excerpts:

"Back then astronaut captains made about $17,000 a year, NPR reports and a life insurance policy for Neil Armstrong would have run about $50,000 a year, or more than $300,000 in 2012 dollars."

So how did they "buy" insruance?

"It happened like this:

Because some guys from the prior Apollo missions had gotten colds and mild bouts of queasiness on their trips, NASA had implemented a quarantine procedure before liftoffs.

So about a month before they were set to go to the moon, Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin were locked into a Plexiglas room together and got busy providing for their families the only way they could — they signed hundreds of autographs.

In what would become a common practice, the guys signed their names on envelopes emblazoned with various space-related images. The 'covers' would, of course, become intensely valuable should the trio perish on the mission. They're now often referred to as " Apollo Insurance Covers."

And to ensure the covers would hold maximum value, the crew put stamps on them, and sent them in a package to a friend, who dumped them all in the mail so they would be postmarked July 16, 1969 — the day of the mission's success — or its failure."

Has enough time passed so that everyone has forgotten that the economy ever had a problem?

It still doesn't seem like it. See Lehman Brothers, We Heard You Were Dead by ADAM DAVIDSON in Sunday's New York Times. He has a great quote from economist

"Kenneth Rogoff, who co-wrote the pre-eminent history of financial crises, “This Time Is Different,” told me that crises don’t end because new laws are enacted and politicians can be trusted again. In 1945, “the financial markets were devastated,” he said. “State and local governments had defaulted on everything. Lending had shrunk.” Somehow, though, the economy recovered and experienced nearly 30 years of robust growth. Confidence comes, he said, when “enough time passes so everyone forgets there was ever a problem.”"

I have quoted Rogoff before. See The Government Bailout: Are We Replacing Market Failure With Government Failure? and Gross public debt exceeding about 90% of annual economic output can slow growth.

Don't click on this link because it might be X-rated

Will Moving To NCAA Division I Status Pay Off For The University of the Incarnate Word?

See UIW looking to score more than points with football from The San Antonio Express-News.

"To understand why the University of the Incarnate Word is making the financially burdensome move to NCAA Division I status in coming months, University of Texas Professor Bob Heere suggests a quick trip downtown. There sits the Alamodome, which operates at an annual loss of more than $1 million. “The city of San Antonio uses the Alamodome to profile itself, to brand itself, to actually give their own citizens and residents a sense of community and something they can be proud of,” said Heere, a professor of kinesiology and health education who recently helped UTSA study the effect of adding Division I football to its athletic lineup. “College sports are exactly the same. You run at a loss, but in return, you hope it increases the sense of community.”"

"Like most of more than 340 Division I programs nationwide, UIW will extract millions from its general operating budget to subsidize athletics, counting on the intrinsic value of sports programs to counter the literal costs. Last season in Division II, UIW says it spent almost $9 million on athletics, including $4.9 million on scholarships. Of that, $1.6 million was committed to football operations and scholarships. In a buildup of expenses during the next four years, athletic director Mark Papich is targeting an eventual athletic budget of about $14 million, including almost $7.6 million for an additional 75 available scholarships for all sports."

"A recent study of NCAA data by Fulks showed virtually no Football Championship Subdivision program turns a profit in athletics. While the most successful Football Bowl Championship operations, such as Texas and Ohio State, can clear $35 million or more in a year, the typical FCS school spends about $9 million above what it generates in revenues annually."

“We do know that having a successful football team might have a positive effect on enrollment, but that's only temporary,” Heere said. “An unsuccessful team can have the opposite effect.” Added Michigan sports economics Professor Rod Fort: “The usual response is that it helps with student attraction and the quality of the undergrad and faculty pool. And there is a bit of evidence that is true — but in a very small amount.”"

Rod Fort has a sports/economics blog called Sports and Monsters. There is some evidence that a winning sports team can help a college. See The Flutie Effect: When The Teams Win, More Students Apply To The College.

A related post was There's A New Book On The Economics Of College Sports

Lobster Wars: U.S. vs. Canada

Update 9-19: The Washington Post reports US seafood catch reaches 17-year high, all regions show increases in catch numbers.

It looks like supply and demand are the main weapons. See Cheap Maine lobsters spark protests in Canada. Excerpt:

"Maine-caught lobster, whose abundance this summer has driven prices here to the lowest levels in a generation, has sparked angry protests among lobstermen in New Brunswick.

Fishermen in Cap-Pele, New Brunswick, blocked access to several processing plants Thursday to protest an influx of Maine lobster after being told they would be expected to provide fewer lobsters when their season opens next week.

Maine truck driver Leonard Garnett of Steuben talks with police at a Shediac, New Brunswick, processing plant after fishermen blocked his truck with the intention of leaving his load of lobsters to rot.

On Thursday morning, emergency tactical police teams responded to calls for help from two lobster processing companies in Cap-Pele, a small French-speaking town on the Northumberland Strait, 200 miles east of Calais.

The police encountered about 200 lobstermen and followed them as they moved from one plant to the other, demanding that the owners stop processing U.S. lobster, the CBC reported.

Both plants were reportedly closed, with workers sent home.

At midday, lobstermen in nearby Shediac spotted a tractor-trailer truck with Maine plates carrying a load of lobsters, according to the CBC, and blocked it in a driveway with the intention of leaving the lobsters to rot.

The blockades followed a meeting Wednesday night called by the Maritime Fishermen's Union, at which 400 lobstermen commiserated about cheap soft-shell lobsters from Maine that are flooding local processing plants before the opening of their summer fishing season.

Reports say they expressed concern that Maine lobster -- for which lobstermen are getting well under $3 a pound -- will undermine demand and prices for locally caught lobster."

Did a Nobel prize winning economist mathematically prove that character matters?

See Opting Out of the 'Rug Rat Race': For success in the long run, brain power helps, but what our kids really need to learn is grit. It is from the WSJ last week. Heckman found that students who don't graduate from high school but who later go on to get their GED have the same cognitive ability as those who did graduate. But they are way behind in things like graduating from college. Exerpt:

"What matters most in a child's development, they (psychologists) say, is not how much information we can stuff into her brain in the first few years of life. What matters, instead, is whether we are able to help her develop a very different set of qualities, a list that includes persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit and self-confidence. Economists refer to these as noncognitive skills, psychologists call them personality traits, and the rest of us often think of them as character.

If there is one person at the hub of this new interdisciplinary network, it is James Heckman, an economist at the University of Chicago who in 2000 won the Nobel Prize in economics. In recent years, Mr. Heckman has been convening regular invitation-only conferences of economists and psychologists, all engaged in one form or another with the same questions: Which skills and traits lead to success? How do they develop in childhood? And what kind of interventions might help children do better?

The transformation of Mr. Heckman's career has its roots in a study he undertook in the late 1990s on the General Educational Development program, better known as the GED, which was at the time becoming an increasingly popular way for high-school dropouts to earn the equivalent of high-school diplomas. The GED's growth was founded on a version of the cognitive hypothesis, on the belief that what schools develop, and what a high-school diploma certifies, is cognitive skill. If a teenager already has the knowledge and the smarts to graduate from high school, according to this logic, he doesn't need to waste his time actually finishing high school. He can just take a test that measures that knowledge and those skills, and the state will certify that he is, legally, a high-school graduate, as well-prepared as any other high-school graduate to go on to college or other postsecondary pursuits.

Mr. Heckman wanted to examine this idea more closely, so he analyzed a few large national databases of student performance. He found that in many important ways, the premise behind the GED was entirely valid. According to their scores on achievement tests, GED recipients were every bit as smart as high-school graduates. But when Mr. Heckman looked at their path through higher education, he found that GED recipients weren't anything like high-school graduates. At age 22, Mr. Heckman found, just 3% of GED recipients were either enrolled in a four-year university or had completed some kind of postsecondary degree, compared with 46% of high-school graduates. In fact, Heckman discovered that when you consider all kinds of important future outcomes—annual income, unemployment rate, divorce rate, use of illegal drugs—GED recipients look exactly like high-school dropouts, despite the fact that they have earned this supposedly valuable extra credential, and despite the fact that they are, on average, considerably more intelligent than high-school dropouts.

These results posed, for Mr. Heckman, a confounding intellectual puzzle. Like most economists, he had always believed that cognitive ability was the single most reliable determinant of how a person's life would turn out. Now he had discovered a group—GED holders—whose good test scores didn't seem to have any positive effect on their eventual outcomes. What was missing from the equation, Mr. Heckman concluded, were the psychological traits, or noncognitive skills, that had allowed the high-school graduates to make it through school."

Captain Morgan's spiced rum at $47.52 a half gallon?

That is in Longview, Wash. See Liquor Buyers Cross State Line: Prices Went Up—Not Down—After Washington State Ended Control of Booze Sales, from the WSJ earlier this week. The state of Washington just recently privatized all of its liquor stores. Before that, privately owned stores could only sell beer and wine. Anyone wanting hard liquor had to go to a state owned store. Prices did not fall as expected because the state added some required fees.:

"Even before privatization, Washington had some of the nation's highest liquor taxes and fees, at $26.70 a gallon. The national average is $7.02 a gallon, said the Tax Foundation, a research group. Washington state's levies included government stores' 52% markup, a 21% liquor sales tax and a $3.77-per-liter excise tax.

And while those sales and excise taxes remain under privatization, new fees further raised prices: Liquor distributors must pay an additional 10% levy, and retailers another 17%. Distributors also are on the hook for any shortfall to the state if they don't generate $150 million from the 10% fee by April."

So Washington residents are crossing the border.

"In Rainier, the Oregon liquor commission said sales jumped 60%, compared with the same period last summer. Ms. Brumbles, of Rainier Liquor, added staff and store hours to meet demand from Washington shoppers. "You know how the week is before Christmas? It's like that every single day," she said."

The new, higher fees are helping to drive up the price in Washington. Part of those fees are passed along to the consumers in the form of higher prices. Businesses are not usually able to pass all of a tax like this along to the buyers. See If You Lower The Excise Tax On A Good By $1.00, Does A Firm Save $1.00 On Each Unit Sold?

Why Would A Weak College Football Team Agree To Play A Vastly Superior Team That Everyone Knows Will Win Easily?

Money. See Thrash-for-cash not such a bad thing for a financially strapped Savannah State. Yes, there is a Savannah State University and it needs money. So they agreed to play powerhouse Oklahoma State last week for a $385,000 payday. Oklahoma St. won 84-0. This week Savannah State University plays Florida State University and will recieve $475,000. Last week 6th ranked Florida State University beat Murray State University 69-3. Savannah St. must be getting a share of the ticket revenue and TV revenue when the go to play these other schools on the road.

Maker Of Thalidomide Apologizes

Thalidomide was sold to pregnant women in the 1950s and early 1960s to cure morning sickness. It was made by the German company Grunenthal. It caused serious birth defects before being taken off the market. See Thalidomide victims reject 'insulting' apology from drug company.

Thalidomide came up in my micro classes this week since we read a chapter from the book The Economics of Public Issues that discussed the dilemma the FDA faces in approving drugs.

There is a danger that the FDA will make a Type I error, meaning an unsafe drug is allowed onto the market. To try to avoid that, they can test a new drug for a long time to make sure it is safe. But in the mean time people might be dying because they cannot get the drug. When that happens, it is called a Type II error. This happened with Septra, an antibiotic. 

The book reports that "in 2006, the FDA gave physicians the OK to use it (thalidomide) in treating bone marrow cancer."

Another Semester Has Started

Welcome to any new students. I usually post something three times a week on Wed., Fri. and Sun. The next post should be next Wed. The entries usually have something to do with a basic economic principle that is related to a recent news story. If you want to learn more about me go to Why is college so hard?

Cartoon Teaches Economics "By Word Of Mouse"

It has Sylvester the cat but the real star is a little mouse who is an econmics professor. It is called "By Word Of Mouse." It was produced by Warner Brothers in 1954. Here is what IMDB says about it:

"This was the first of three cartoons on economic subjects underwritten by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. It was followed by Heir-Conditioned and Yankee Dood It."

Here is what Wikipedia says about it:

"Starting in 1950, New York University’s Institute of Economic Affairs received annual grants for projects concerned with educating the public on economics issues, including a series of educational animated short films through Warner Bros. Animation starring Sylvester and Elmer Fudd and directed by Friz Freleng that illustrate basic elements of capitalism. This series includes By Word of Mouse (1954), Heir-Conditioned (1955) and Yankee Dood It (1956)."

Great New Book On Neuroscience By Economist Paul Zak

It is called The Moral Molecule: The Source of Love and Prosperity. Zak coined the term neuroeconomics but this book seems to be about so much more than the title suggests. I doubt I can convey how interesting and well written this book is (I may not be totally objective since I am among the people thanked for their help in the acknowledgements).

Zak wrote a good summary article in The Wall Street Journal. See The Trust Molecule.

The "moral molecule" is oxytocin and the book explains many experiments that show that we tend to be more trusting when it is present or increases (how oxytocin affects us and works with other hormones and neurotransmitters is alot more complex than this, though, as Zak's work shows). How this is related to empathy is discussed and this is where Adam Smith comes in (his theories on sympathy).

The book examines when and why people are nice and when they are not. When are we altruistic and when are we selfish? The role that evolution played is examined. How this all affects us socially and politically is discussed. Zak is an expert on how trust is a key ingredient to the success of economies and trust is related to oxytocin. His experiments show what happens when people have their amount of oxytocin increased. How this is all related to relgion is discussed.

The book is also full of humorous anecdotes and personal stories. It is highly entertaining and thought provoking. The insights into human nature are amazing. I especially liked the discussion of "in-groups" and "out-groups." You don't have to be a neuroscientist or economist to understand it and it might be a great book for professors to assign to undergraduates.

It received an excellent review in The Wall Street Journal. See Kin and Kindness by MICHAEL SHERMER, publisher of Skeptic magazine and a monthly columnist for Scientific American.

Here are two articles about professor Zak's 2010 Mind Science Foundation lecture from the San Antonio Express-News:

Emerging field offers insight into human virtues

Humans release ‘niceness' chemical

More information about neuroeconomics can be found at (these are two short articles by Zak that give you some idea of what he does in his experiments):

Neuroeconomics Explained, Part One

Neuroeconomics Explained, Part Two

Adam Smith vs. Bart Simpson. (A post of mine from last year and it also has a link to a video of Zak lecturing on all of this)

Joseph Campbell Meets Joseph Schumpeter (The Entrepreneur As Hero)

(Published in The New Leaders: The Business Bulletin for Transformative Leadership, November/December 1992.)

Entrepreneurs are heroes. They are not like heroes, they are heroes. Heroes and entrepreneurs are called to and take part in the greatest and most universal adventure that life has to offer: the simultaneous journey of self-discovery, spiritual growth, and the personal creativity they make possible. In fact, the entrepreneur’s journey closely resembles the journey of the “hero” in mythology, as outlined in the book The Hero With a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell. There is an amazing and profound similarity between not only the journey that entrepreneurs take and the adventure of heroes but also in their personality traits. The comparison is profound because the myths are about universal human desires and conflicts that we see played out in the lives of entrepreneurs. 

But what is the hero's adventure? Campbell writes "The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation-initiation-return, which might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth. A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder; fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won; the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man." How is the hero's adventure similar to the entrepreneur's adventure?

The hero's journey begins with a call to adventure. He or she is awakened by some herald which touches his or her unconscious world and creative destiny. The entrepreneur, too, is "called" to the adventure. By chance, he or she discovers a previously unknown product or way to make a profit. The lucky discovery cannot be planned and is itself the herald of the adventure.

The entrepreneur must step out of the ordinary way of producing and into his or her imagination about the way things could be to discover the previously undreamt of technique or product. The "fabulous forces" might be applying the assembly line technique or interchangeable parts to producing automobiles or building microcomputers in a garage. The mysterious adventure is the time spent tinkering in research and development. But once those techniques are discovered or developed, the entrepreneur now has the power to bestow this boon on the rest of humankind. 

Heroes bring change. Campbell refers to the constant change in the universe as "The Cosmogonic Cycle" which "unrolls the great vision of the creation and destruction of the world which is vouchsafed as revelation to the successful hero." This is similar to Joseph Schumpeter's theory of entrepreneurship called “creative destruction.” A successful entrepreneur simultaneously destroys and creates a new world, or at least a new way of life. Henry Ford, for example, destroyed the horse and buggy age while creating the age of the automobile. The hero also finds that the world "suffers from a symbolical deficiency" and "appears on the scene in various forms according to the changing needs of the race." The changing needs and the deficiency correspond to the changing market conditions or the changing desires for products. The entrepreneur is the first person to perceive the changing needs. 

Regarding personality traits, the hero and entrepreneur are risk-takers and creators. But what is the source of their creativity? People become creative when in the words of Campbell, they "follow their bliss." This is the message of mythology. It means you should engage in an activity, pursue a career or entrepreneurial venture because it is what you love to do and it gives you a sense of personal importance and fulfillment, not because the social system dictates that you do so. The drive comes from within. It is this courageous action that opens up doors and creative possibilities that did not previously exist. This is the journey of self-discovery and spiritual growth. Although it may be long, painful, and lonely, it is very rewarding.

Both the entrepreneur and hero are aided by mentors, are humble enough to listen to others in order to learn (and thus become creative), and face a road of trials where they must continually slay the demons and dragons of their own unconscious (such as fear, their egos) in order to discover their creative ability which ultimately comes from giving themselves up to a higher power. 

Ultimately, they become selfless and can see the creative possibilities that the universe offers. They become masters of two worlds, one of imagination and creativity and the other of material things and business. This mastery makes it possible for them to bestow the boon.

Here is a link to a longer, more academic version.

The Creative-Destroyers: Are Entrepreneurs Mythological Heroes?  

A transcript of an interview when Joseph Campbell called entrepreneurs heroes

Is There A Tradeoff Between Helping The Poor And Protecting The Environment?

See Brazilian Forestry Legislation Advances By JOHN LYONS of The Wall Street Journal. It is about a law that Brazil just passed. Excerpts:

"The law, which eases restrictions for forest set-asides on farms and waives some fines for past clear-cutting, was backed by a new generation of lawmakers with links to Brazil's economically vital rural hinterlands. Farmers there long complained that existing laws were so strict as to classify the majority of farms as illegal and their owners as criminals."

"At the heart of the bid to update the law is an unsettling fact for environmental groups: Much of the Amazon forest slashed and burned in past decades is today extremely productive farmland."

"The controversies reflect a broader political dilemma for President Dilma Rousseff. Many of her left-wing Workers Party supporters also back environmental causes. At the same time, her administration is seeking to develop Brazil's vast natural resources to speed growth and help fund programs to lift millions of poor into the middle class."

Does Neuroscience Prove That You Should Follow Your Bliss?

The Freakonomicis guys, STEPHEN J. DUBNER and STEVEN D. LEVITT wrote an article in 2006 in the NY Times magazine called A Star Is Made. In it, they discussed the research of Anders Ericsson, a 58-year-old psychology professor at Florida State University. Here is a relevant passage:

"Ericsson's research suggests a third cliché as well: when it comes to choosing a life path, you should do what you love — because if you don't love it, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good. Most people naturally don't like to do things they aren't "good" at. So they often give up, telling themselves they simply don't possess the talent for math or skiing or the violin. But what they really lack is the desire to be good and to undertake the deliberate practice that would make them better."

See Never Too Late to Learn. It is a book review from Saturday's WSJ. The book reviewed was Guitar Zero by Gary Marcus. Here is the passage:

"Brain scans show that musicians' new neuronal connections vary according to the instrument they play. Violinists have their signature brain changes, brass players theirs. Loving what we do helps to form these new connections, because the same dopamine chemistry that gives us the pleasurable rush of reward consolidates new brain connections."

Of course, mythologist Joseph Campbell said "follow your bliss."

What does it mean to follow your bliss? In general, it means three things:

1. Money and material things are secondary (Campbell, 1988, pp. 148,229). The following is dialogue between Joseph Campbell and Bill Movers from The Power of Myth (1988,p. 148):

C: My general formula is "Follow your bliss." Find where it is, and don't be afraid to follow it.

M: Is it my work or my life?

C: If the work you're doing is the work that you choose to do because you are enjoying it, that's it. But if you think, "Oh, no! I couldn't do that!" that's the dragon locking you in. "No, no, I couldn't be a writer," or "No, no, I couldn't do what So-and-so is doing."

M: In this sense, unlike heroes such as Prometheus or Jesus, we're not going on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves.

C: But in doing that, you save the world (emphasis added).

Elsewhere, Campbell says that the savior is the one who can transcend the pairs of opposites (Briggs & Maher, 1989, p. 45). This means going beyond the duality of individual and group that is stressed in socio-economics (Campbell 1988, p. 229):

C: Each incarnation has a potentiality, and the mission of the life is to live that potentiality. How do you do it? My answer is, "Follow your bliss." There's something inside you that knows when you're in the center, that knows when you're on the beam or off the beam. And if you get off the beam to earn money, you've lost your life. And it you stay in the center and don't get any money, you still have your bliss.

Finally, Leeming sums up the Jungian importance of myths:

The person who lives without myths lives without roots, without links to the collective self which is finally what we are all about. He is literally isolated from reality. The person who lives with a myth gains 'a sense of wider meaning' to his existence and is raised 'beyond mere getting and spending" (Leeming, 1973, p. 321).

2. If you follow your bliss, doors (opportunities) will open up for you where they would not have opened up before. They will also open up for you where they would not have opened up for anyone else (Cousineau, 1990, p. 214). This echoes one of Campbell's favorite writers, Goethe:

Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elemental truth-the ignorance of which skills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, the Providence moves, too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred (Catford & Ray, 1991, p. 5).

3. Following your bliss has to be contrasted with following a system or a social system. A system creates roles for us that are not of our own choosing. This dehumanizes us (Campbell, 1988, p. 143-144). The following is also dialogue between Joseph Campbell and Bill Movers from The Power of Myth (pp. 143-144):

M: Do movies create hero myths? Do you think, for example that a movie like Star Wars fills some of that need for a model of the hero?

C: I've heard youngsters use some of George Lucas' terms-"the Force" and "the dark side.' So it must be hitting somewhere. It's a good sound teaching, I would say.

M: I think that explains in part the success of Star Wars. It wasn't just the production value that made that such an exciting film to watch, it was that it came along at a time when people needed to see in recognizable images the clash between good and evil. They needed to be reminded of idealism, to see a romance based upon selflessness rather than selfishness.

C: The fact that the evil power is not identified with any specific nation on this earth means you've got an abstract power, which represents a principle, not a specific historic situation. The story has to do with an operation of principles not of this nation against that. The monster masks that are put on people in Star Wars represent the real monster force in the modern world. When the mask of Darth Vader is removed, you see an unformed man, one who has not developed as a human individual. What you see is a strange and pitiful sort of undifferentiated face.

M: What is the significance of that?

C: Darth Vader has not developed his own humanity. He's a robot. He's a bureaucrat, living not in terms of himself but in terms of an imposed system. This is the threat to our lives that we all face today. Is the system gong to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes? How do you relate to the system so that you am not compulsively serving it? It doesn't help to try to change it to accord with your system of thought. The momentum of history behind it is too great for anything really significant to evolve from that kind of action. The thing to do is to learn to live in your period of history as a human being. That's something else, and it can be done.

M: By doing what?

C: By holding to you own ideals for yourself and, like Luke Skywalker, rejecting the system's impersonal claims upon you.

M: When I took our two sons to see Star Wars, they did the same thing the audience did at that moment when the voice of Ben Kenobi says to Skywalker in the climactic moment of the last fight, "Turn off your computer, turn off your machine and do it yourself, follow your feelings, trust your feelings." And when he did, he achieved success, and the audience broke out into applause.

C: Well, you see, that movie communicates. It is a language that talks to young people, and that's what counts. It asks, Are you going to be a person of heart and humanity-because that's where the life is, from the heart-or are you going to do whatever seems to be required of you by what might be called "intentional power"? When Ben Kenobi says, "May the Force be with you," he's speaking of the power and energy of life, not of programmed political intentions.

In the movie Star Wars, Luke Skywalker turns off his computer (the impersonal system) and relies on the "Force" or his intuition to destroy the Death Star.

Generally speaking, following your bliss unlocks your creative potential because you separate from your community or system. "You can't have creativity unless you leave behind the bounded, the fixed, all the rules" (Campbell, 1988, p. 156). Attaining the joy of being a creative, spiritually fulfilled person is probably the best thing we can do for ourselves.

Sources:

Briggs, D., & Maher, J.M. (1989). An open life: Joseph Campbell in conversation with Michael Toms. New York: Harper and Row.

Campbell, J. (1988). The power of myth. New York: Doubleday.

Catford, L., & Ray, M. (1991). The path of the everyday hero. Los Angeles: Tarcher.

Cousineau, P. (1990). The hero's journey: Joseph Campbell on his life and work. San Francisco: Harper.

Leeming, D.A. (1973). Mythology: The voyage of the hero. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott.

You've Heard About Death And Taxes, But What About Taxes And Death?

See Fatal car wrecks jump on tax day by Aaron Smith of CNN. Excerpts:

"The odds of getting into a fatal crash increase by 6% on tax filing day, according to a study published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association."

""One explanation is that stressful deadlines lead to driver distraction and worsen short-term human error," Dr. Redelmeier told CNNMoney. He said that sleep deprivation, greater use of alcohol, lower tolerance for other drivers, and the "unwanted distraction" of filing taxes could all contribute to a jump in accidents."

Are rich taxed less than secretaries?

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Should the unemployment rate be lower given the current job-vacancy rate?

See On Jobs, No Time for a Celebratory Beveridge by JUSTIN LAHART of The Wall Street Journal. Excerpt:

"There were 3.5 million job openings at the end of February, the Labor Department said Tuesday, up from three million a year earlier. The job-vacancy rate, which measures job openings as a percentage of total jobs in the U.S., was 2.6%.

In the seven years before the recession, a vacancy rate of 2.6% was associated with an unemployment rate of about 5.7%. Now, the unemployment rate is much higher—it was 8.2% in March, down from 8.3% in February. That may augur a disturbing shift in the labor market that will keep more people out of work, slow the economy and make U.S. companies less profitable.

High job-vacancy rates come about because employers are having a hard time filling jobs. So they are associated with low unemployment rates. When vacancy rates are low, the opposite is true. Plot out unemployment rates against vacancy rates, and you get what is called the Beveridge curve, a downward-sloping line named after the late British economist William Beveridge.

But the Beveridge curve, nearly three years after the economy began to recover, looks different than it did before the recession struck in late 2007. Unemployment rates are much higher versus vacancy rates than they used to be. Shifts like that in the Beveridge curve suggest the labor market has become less efficient at matching workers with jobs, something that can happen when workers don't have the skills that employers need."

The problem could be a mismatch between the skills of the unemployed and the skills employers want (this is an example of structural unemployment). For those workers, they could be unemployed for a long time.