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3 Economic Principles You Can Apply to Your Life

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Time to rewind back to Economics 101. The beautiful topic of Economics is based on the principal of scarcity: we have a limited amount of time and resources available to us and must make choices of how to allocate what we DO have. In college, this means balancing the 3 S’s: Sleep, Studying and Socializing. Take a look at the following three principles and think about how you can apply them to your own life.

Opportunity Cost

This balancing act presents an opportunity cost: what you need to give up to attain what you2384185522_71ae7b4334_m want. For example, you can choose to study for an exam or go party with friends. If you choose to study, your opportunity cost is partying with friends. Opportunity costs do not always have a …show more content…

From there you can determine your values and use the principal of opportunity cost to make your decision.

The Law of Diminishing Returns

1933599909_d5dde5519e_mThe law of diminishing returns states that if one factor of production is increased while the others remain constant, the overall returns will relatively decrease after a certain point. “For example, if more and more laborers are added to harvest a wheat field, at some point each additional laborer will add relatively less output than his predecessor did, simply because he has less and less of the fixed amount of land to work with.” (http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1E1-diminish.html)

Here are some real life examples that might make more sense:
-Eating your 4th hot dog brings you less satisfaction than your first or second did.
-A drug addict needs more and more of a drug to feel the same pleasure he did from his first high to get the same effect.
-An extra hour of studying at 2am is less productive than your 1st hour of studying at 9pm was.
There are mathematic ways of calculating the point at which your action has less of an effect. The truth

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