Kieran Lawrence looks at autonomous weapons and the effect they could have on modern warfare
Continuing a series on world leaders, Miles Deverson takes a look at Angela Merkel
Ben Bland examines the fallout from the Iowa caucuses and looks forward to the New Hampshire primaries.
In the first of a series on world leaders, Miles Deverson takes a look at Nicholas Sarkozy
The Yorker’s politics team recognises that economics is not the easiest topic to get your teeth into. Yet we also feel an understanding of economics can benefit everyone. This column aims to demonstrate why. Cutting through the jargon, we hope to provide economic solutions to everyday student problems.
Last week we took a look at why students choose to party so often, it was seen that this was down to problems with efficiency. Yet for most students, partying is not their big inefficiency programme – the real danger is procrastination.
We have all been there, a big essay deadline looming, yet we cannot help ourselves from avoiding the essay and tidying our room for the 3rd time, or checking out what our friends are eating for lunch on Twitter. Ultimately we get trapped by the perils of procrastination.
For these questions, we should go back to the idea of a Production Possibility Frontier. That is the idea that students have to effectively choose between two goods. The first is leisure time, the second work time. Ultimately, students have twenty-four hours per day to spread their choices out between. If they choose 16 hours of leisure, they can only choose 8 hours of work and so on.
When we considered why students spend so long partying, the problem was them allocating too much time to leisure and not enough time to work, that is to say they were allocatively inefficient. The problem here is what is known as productive inefficiency, as procrastination is neither leisure, nor is it work. This means that individuals aren’t meeting their total possible opportunities, they are, for example devoting 14 hours to leisure, 6 hours to work with 4 ‘wasted’ hours.
This productive inefficiency seems irrational, there are two things people want to do (work and leisure), why would someone choose not to optimise their time so that they only did work and leisure?
Yet economics can explain why this occurs, even in a rational individual. Economics tells us that an individual will only do something if the costs exceed the benefits. We all know that actually sitting down and doing an essay brings significant benefits in terms of passing your degree and getting a good grade which (hopefully) leads to a better paid job in the future. Yet as humans the benefit we get from things in the future are not as great as the benefit we get from things we do now. Think of the old proverb “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”.
This means that the benefit now of doing the essay instead of procrastinating is slim, whereas the costs are fairly high. The subject is not interesting, it requires a lot of hard work to do all the research and you have to walk in the rain to the library. The current benefit of the essay is less than the current cost.
There is also a benefit and cost decision as the individual chooses not to enjoy leisure time. There can be significant costs associated with leisure. These costs can be expressive – you ultimately don’t go out and enjoy yourself because you don’t want to feel like your letting yourself down by not doing your essay. The cost is your feeling of self-worth plummeting as you sit in a pub drinking knowing you should be working.
The benefits of enjoying leisure time during the middle of the day are also reduced. Your friends may be in lectures, or also procrastinating from essays, so will be unwilling to come out with you. The benefit you get from leisure time in the middle of the day is significantly less than the costs involved with leaving your unwritten essay at home as you go out.
So the solution is to do neither, and instead procrastinate. Procrastination avoids the feeling of guilt that you’re not doing your essay. If you’re like me, one tab on your browser will have the journal article open, but next to it you have Facebook, news and emails. You can tell yourself you are working, even if 80% of the time is spent away from that journal tab.
Additionally, the costs associated with working are also not there – the procrastination is not as dull as actually doing the work, there is no research and you are protected from the rain in your house. So here, the only rational action is to procrastinate, even though it is the least efficient action available.
Many thanks to Thomas Wickersham who gave ideas for the development of this article.
Definitely just read this as a procrastination method 
Good series of articles though.
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