Our Singing Economy

What a day. What started out as a crappy day found its way of quickly turning itself around. Prying my eyes open this morning took a terrific effort, one that I thought would quickly prove not to be worth while. As I prepared for class by doing homework and online-quizzes, I wondered how I would make it through the rest of the day. Time was cut short by one teacher who we have come to call Heda. She is, for all of you who don’t know her, an econ and stats professor, a very compassionate one at that. She is roughly 53 years old, and cares greatly about her students. Wednesday, she invited my friend and me to an econ competition type thing. She insisted we come and check it out so that next year we can participate in it. This is where the idea for this blog entry came about, but we will get to that later.

After school, I headed home to change and go straight to work. Little did I know tonight would be one of the busiest nights of the year thus far at Pizza Hut. The crew handled it very well, but could have worked better as a team. Overall it was a good, productive night, one in which we blew our projections for net sales and labor percentage out of the water. So, here I am at 2:30 a.m. after closing up shop, leaving work no earlier than 1:30 tonight, slightly buzzing off what I call wave energy, in which your body is giving off the radioactive electricity gained from a successful night. The word I use to describe the way I feel is short for wave power, by definition a renewable source of energy (renewable by the high I get when running a shift at work.)

So, as you can all relate, I’m a little exhausted from a hard week, and a difficult end to it. Tonight I would like to bring attention to the issue of our plummeting housing market. I do not have a source for this, other than the economics department at IPFW, who were all debating this issue earlier in Friday’s gloomy afternoon. Our country was expected to experience a 10% drop in value of property, and Friday morning Bloomberg reported values to experience a 13% decrease, one in which it fell more than expected. This number is very significant, because it means that if you go to sell your house, it will not be worth as much due to low demand and other factors.

We hear a lot about the negative effects of this; let me take a minute to explain why. We are focused on raising this number because when it is low, you cannot get much out of your home. To an economist, this means less to spend in the market if you traded or sold your home. In this case, your property is like a stock, which lowers in value, and you cannot get as much per share when selling. Just like stocks, on the lighter side, it is a great time to buy. I am turning 21 in two days, and will be looking for a small house in the next couple of years. If this number stays low, it will benefit a buyer, or one who is looking to get into the market. I could get more house for my money, or pay less for a house than I would a year or two ago.

I don’t know about you guys, but I can’t get enough of the economical perspective of life. Thinking like an economist is easy in some situations, but could become a problem when applying it to something like school. I mean school is the one thing people pay for and want less of. Everyone tries to get the easy teachers and get pissed off when they get stuck with one who makes them do homework and actually learn something. This is a problem for me, because I don’t go to the car dealer and say “Here is the money for a new Z06 ‘Vette, but I’ll take the Cavalier instead.” So, to sum up, I don’t mind having hard classes; at least I feel that I am getting my money’s worth out of them.