Optimizing to Succeed

"Casual observation is not completely accurate," stated Professor Min Sok Lee after the break, "as we should base our choices through empiricism." 

Before class

Whenever we make choices, we should optimize - make the best feasible decision in a given situation. For instance, in terms of health, the increase in food consumption leads to increase in weight -  there is a positive correlation. The best feasible decision, one would think, is to not consume at all if one is trying to lose weight so I limited my food consumption for lunch - barely ate anything.

We had a lunch break at 11:30, after the professor finished discussing optimization and equilibrium. Unfortunately, we did not touch on the chapter about empiricism, before lunch. After the break, I felt very hungry. Soon enough the professor started discussing the topic of omitted variables. 

Education is key!

Just because there was a relationship between food consumption and weight gain does not imply that the optimal decision is to starve yourself. Soon as the professor went in detail about omitted variables, I completely missed out on the concept of how one should not solely base their idea on 1 type of data but rather look at multiple amounts of data, to further search for omitted variables. In this case one of the omitted variables is "When does food consumption - breakfast, lunch, or dinner - increase your weight the most?" Eating heavy at lunch is more optimal than eating heavy at dinner. Right after my class was over, I consumed 3 slices of pizza for dinner because I was very hungry. Thus, the optimal decision would be to consume more food at lunch than be starved for dinner or otherwise one would end up eating more at dinner, which contributes to weight gain.

On my quest to become healthy, I have become aware of the physical choices I am making. I never played sports but rather spent most of my time in front of the laptop for the past couple of days. Whereas now, being conscious of optimization, I have started to hit the gym and play various sports with some of my buddies - Sung, Jae, Ethan, Rebecca, and Olivia. Though the run yesterday was healthy, it was very tiring. I realized that playing a sport would be more fun than just plain old running. I am glad to say that I am making an optimal decision in physical activities as well! 

John List, the Chief Economic Advisor for Lyft, came to our class to talk about opportunity cost and basic economic fundamentals. His initial claim was Facebook is not free. Aside from personalized advertisements, Facebook is essentially stealing someone's time where time has a correlation with money! The more time I have, the more opportunity I have to make more money! This implies that I could potentially be making more feasible choices rather than using up my time. If the whole population was to not use any Facebook, it could have generated 2.5 billion dollars, altogether towards towards an average person's income. 

Through an economics lens, one can minimize the usage of social media to primarily make better usage of time.  

I, also, thought about how Don points out the first row of seats helps students better engage in class. He is initially suggesting that the optimal decision is to sit in the front of the class because it helps the students better learn as seen by Chris Hakala, a psychology professor at Western New England University, and statistical evidence. 

While Economics is perceived more as the study of money, it is rather the choices one makes and its impact on society. As the coursework adds up, I will be learning more about how applying Economics to one's personal life helps them make better decisions.