Here’s a letter to a new correspondent:
Mr. S__:
You think me “doctrinaire” to criticize James Broughel for claiming that (as he put it) “it would be more economically efficient if we lived in a world where scientists and engineers were as highly valued as actors and athletes are in our own culture.” In your view, “Dr. Broughel is just pointing out the obvious point that we’d be better off if we put more value on the outputs of scientists and the like than we do on what entertainers give us.”
What’s obvious to you (and perhaps also to Mr. Broughel) isn’t obvious to me. Who are you or Mr. Broughel to sit in judgment of how other income earners spend the fruits of their labor? I can’t begin to quantify the pleasure that I’ve gotten over the years from listening to music from the Beatles and Beethoven, from watching movies starring Harrison Ford and Cary Grant, from tuning in to t.v. shows such as Frasier and Star Trek, and from following the fortunes (and misfortunes) of the New Orleans Saints, the Atlanta Braves, and the football teams of Tulane, Auburn, and UVA. And I’m not alone in finding much satisfaction in such activities. What mysterious metric enables you or Mr. Broughel to conclude that I and other people would be better off – or that our economy would be more efficient – if we consume less entertainment and more science and engineering?
Remember, valuation occurs at the margin – meaning, the economically relevant choice is of, say, one additional broadcast of a football game compared to one additional published scientific paper. The relevant choice is not “all entertainment” versus “all science.” Grasping this reality reveals the impossibility of Mr. Broughel (or anyone else) knowing that people attach too little value to the outputs of scientists than they attach to the outputs of entertainers. The salaries of scientists and engineers are much lower than are the salaries of actors and athletes because supplies of the former, relative to demand, are so much higher than are supplies of the latter. Mr. Broughel leaps without warrant from the fact that scientists and engineers earn lower incomes than do actors and athletes to the conclusion that our society has too few scientists and engineers. Quite the opposite, in fact, is likely the case: The salaries of scientists and engineers are lower than are those of actors and athletes because we have much higher supplies of the former than we do of the latter.
I, for one, am grateful to live in a society in which the costs of obtaining knowledge from scientists and engineers are lower than are the costs of obtaining entertainment from actors and athletes.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
