Have you encountered the book “Freakonomics” (or the sequel Super Freakonomics)? In the book (I have read only the first), as the subtitle claims, “a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything”. The book explores unusual topics from the perspective of an economist and comes to interesting and sometimes counter-intuitive conclusions. I don’t have the book in front of me, but I seem to remember one of the examples involved the question of the benefits and costs of “going for it” when you are fourth and short. If I remember the analysis, the answer is it is better to go for it (tell that to the Vikings after last week). Part of the analysis is to understand that factors other than the probabilities of a given outcome can play a role in decision making. For example, it can be better to take the safe route if that is socially acceptable or “approved” – kind of the “you never get fired for buying IBM” approach. So coaches may kick even though the stats say you are better off attempting to make a first down and thus increase the probability of a touchdown. If this is not an example from the book, I apologize to the author. For anyone else reading this, it is still a good example.
Anyway, I was walking back from lunch today and I noticed something. If one were to look at the roof of campus buildings, some interesting differences can be observed. Some roofs provided a perch for lots of stuff and other roofs did not. There also seemed to be some relationship (correlation is not always causal) between the amount of stuff on the roof and the budgets of the departments housed within. For example, the three roofs appearing below cover the med school, the chemistry department, and the psychology department. Take a guess. Which department has less stuff?
It is my job to make the case for my department. Stuff probably comes with money. In the academic tradition, money comes with grants and rich alumni. Even viewed from an economic perspective, this is not actually how it works. Some departments contribute real money by generating student tuition dollars. So, if you generate 21,000 credit hours at approx. 250 per credit, that comes out to somewhere over 5 million. What was that expression – a million here, a million there, pretty soon it amounts to real money.
The stuff on the roofs sometimes has to do with learning experiences; i.e., labs. You need fancy labs with ventilation hoods to teach chemistry. I think you need labs to teach other things too. This is where the “you never get fired for buying IBM” thing comes in. You are always safe putting money into experiences in the “hard sciences” because there is a common assumption that those studying such subject matter need such experiences. Actually, for those taking lower division courses only, this is difficult to actually demonstrate, but such a position would begin sounding like science and real data and I won’t go there.
Hmm – Dr. Curmudgeon, “you seem a little upset. This was kind of funny, but a little edgy.”
Well, it is some of those other gadgets that have me annoyed. Some of that stuff involves air conditioning and I am still trying to figure out why real scientists require more cooling.