A Day at the Ballpark

Attendance is down at the new Yankee Stadium. Here is a beautiful new stadium but they can’t manage to fill the seats even with A-Rod batting .317 with 10 home runs and 31 RBI’s. The Steinbrenner’s are blaming the recession, but according to Team Marketing Report’s Fan Cost Index a family of four will spend $410.88 to see a single Yankee game. That is up 49% from last year. The Steinbrenner’s argue that the stadium is smaller than the old stadium and therefore they need to raise prices to make ends meet. They can join the club of people currently in positions of power, whether management or politics, who don’t understand basic economics. All the Steinbrenner’s need to do is look at how the Arizona Diamondback’s are doing. A family of four can attend a game for $114.29 in Phoenix, which is down 29.8% from 2008. They have maintained and in some cases increased attendance as they adjust ticket prices to meet the needs of baseball fans.

Economics 101 in One Paragraph: Scarcity and Trade-offs

All of us live in a world of scarce resources and we have unlimited things that we want. So we need to make choices and trade-offs. Each of those trade-offs come with a cost, in other words we must give up something to obtain what is valuable to us. We work in a large city because that is where the jobs are but we give up the small town quiet life, we live in a small town because that is where our children will have the best schools and give up the advantages of a big city, we retire to warm climates to spend more time outdoors but a lot of other folks want to do the same thing so retirement areas are crowded. There are costs and benefits because of choices that we make. We choose to have airbags in our vehicles because the majority of the time they save lives, but on occasion airbags have killed passengers in the vehicles. The FDA takes a great deal of time to test new medications making sure they are safe for consumption before allowing them to be sold to the public, but during that time many people who could possibly benefit from the new drugs are suffering and dying. The largest single use of Ethanol is as a motor fuel and fuel additive. Ethanol can be made from corn or sugar, and is supposed to keep cars running efficiently without causing as much pollution as gasoline. But rain forests in Brazil are being cut down to allow sugar crops to be grown to create Ethanol. Also, where corn is used to create Ethanol the price of corn has gone up dramatically because of high demand and leaving an agricultural mainstay in most cultures around the world in limited supply. After the September 11, 2001 attacks on this country by terrorists the government created new methods of trying to find people that might be a threat to the country, and in doing so found it necessary to infringe on certain citizen’s privacy. So everything has a cost, and there are trade-offs that we all make everyday. It also means that we all have the freedom to make those choices on what to eat, what to wear, where to live, where to work, and how to spend our leisure time, which could include a day at the ballpark.

Tomorrow - Economics 102 in One Paragraph: Supply and Demand from an Ethanol Point of View