The Opportunity Cost of 600 Posts

This will be my blog's 600th post! I started in back in 2006 at the time I was a visiting professor at Beloit College. Like a good economist the first thing that comes to mind is opportunity cost that is what did I give up by writing 600 posts. My guess is I spend about 15 minutes to a half hour on the average posts. So we are looking at maybe 200-300 hours worth of work spread over 6 years. In short about a weeks worth of work over each year. So what could I have done over that year. Perhaps I have could gotten more consulting gigs and earned thousands of dollars, but having tried to get consulting gigs from time to time that is harder than it sounds. I could have spent more time preparing my classes, but in some sense this blog does prepare me for class I look up lots of examples and think about ways to present info to non-economists (and sure enough all of my students are not PhD economists). I also could have written another paper or two, but one thing I like about being at a teaching focused school is that I don't have to get to the diminishing returns part of my research agenda, so my guess is the paper(s) would not have been my best. Of course there is always leisure too!

I think my enjoyment of the posts shows the benefits outweigh the costs.

Looking back here are some my favorite posts
$240 worth of pudding , Evaluating Bar Rescue, Hanukka PPF