Why People Hate Economists

The other day I was running some errands around town on my bike, when I ran into Tom, another Economics teacher from my school. He told me that he had recently read a study that showed you actually cause more energy to be consumed by riding your bike than driving (although he didn't buy the idea completely).

How could this be? Well, if you ride your bike 10 miles, as I did that day, you burn a certain number of calories ( I believe about 400 is a decent estimate). That makes you hungry, so you eat more than you would have if you had driven. Since the food we eat here in America is so energy intensive to produce, it is more efficient to feed your car fuel than yourself food. Tom, by the way, also enjoys cycling, so he seemed torn between the depressing nature of this study, and his delight in the Economist's art of looking at all the benefits and costs.

I have 2 responses to that thinking:

1) The idea of increased food consumption is only true if you assume I would not have exercised and burned those calories some other way, perhaps in a gym on a machine that required electricity. And I would have. Therefore, no incremental eating. By the way, without ever doing the numbers, I had pondered this issue myself before ever having this conversation with Tom....on a long bike ride.

2) No wonder people like Hillary go around dissing Economists. The Economists job is to look at all the costs, which often leads us to learn that things that look like good ideas aren't, like ethanol. Harry Truman once said he wanted to meet a one-armed Economist, because they are always saying "On the other hand....". Ah, the Dismal Science.

As an aside, today was the first day of my summer class. I was discussing how, economically speaking, the world is now extremely connected. On my bike ride home (Tom did not deter me, as I would rather spend my money on food than gas!) I thought about the problem between Politics and Economics. Tip O'Neil once said that "All politics is local". Yet all Economics is global. And that is why politicians make such horrible economics decisions!