Economics

Pam Sorooshian wrote:

When you only allow a limited amount of TV, then the marginal utility of a little more tv is high and every other option looks like a poor one, comparatively. Watching more TV becomes the focus of the person's thinking, since the marginal utility is so high. Relax the constraints and, after a period of adjustment and experimentation to determine accurate marginal utilities, the focus on TV will disappear and it will become just another option.

—Pam Sorooshian
from "Economics of Restricting TV Watching of Children"

SandraDodd.com/t/economics
(in French: Limiter le temps passé devant la télé – le point de vue économique )
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Economics of restrictions

Pam Sorooshian wrote:

What's your favorite thing to do? Watch movies? Read a book? Garden? Go to Disneyland? Why don't you just do that all the time and nothing else? I mean — if it is your favorite, then doesn't it give you higher utility than anything else? Why do you ever stop doing it?

The answer is that as you do more and more of something, the marginal utility of doing even more of it, goes down. As its marginal utility goes down, other things start to look better and better.

When you restrict an activity, you keep the person at the point where the marginal utility is really high.

—Pam Sorooshian

Economics of Restricting TV Watching of Children
photo by Sandra Dodd

If mathematics is easy for a person...

Disclaimers: Unschooling doesn't ensure mathematical ability.

I wrote this before Marty got a degree in economics. They were 18 or older before taking any classes, and only needed to pay for the books.

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My kids all caught up with formal math in a semester or two of community college. Marty did up to calculus. Kirby only took one class but makes use of math all the time in his work and play, and is good with money and loans and banking and all that practical life stuff.

Holly took three classes, I think. Maybe two. Liked it; it wasn't difficult. There were people in class with her bemoaning the difficulty, and they had been in school for twelve years or more, taking math classes.

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That was written in 2014. Their paid employment and their hobbies, since then, have involved some or all of logistics, statistics, financial accounting, coding/programming, inventory and cash handling. What they learned in class was the notation used to communicate mathematical ideas "on paper" in our culture.

Some of their facility might have been inherited genetically from their mathish dad. That's fair, too.

SandraDodd.com/math/schoolmath
photo by Shawn Smythe Haunschild

Let things flow

Pam Sorooshian wrote:

What's your favorite thing to do? Watch movies? Read a book? Garden? Go to Disneyland? Why don't you just do that all the time and nothing else? I mean — if it is your favorite, then doesn't it give you higher utility than anything else? Why do you ever stop doing it?

The answer is that as you do more and more of something, the marginal utility of doing even more of it, goes down. As its marginal utility goes down, other things start to look better and better.

When you restrict an activity, you keep the person at the point where the marginal utility is really high.

—Pam Sorooshian

Economics of Restricting TV Watching of Children
(and it's not just about tv)
photo by Sandra Dodd

Make it plentiful

Once someone tried allowing her children to choose their own foods, and after a month she was ready to give up.

It's only been a month. It might take more than that for them to get as much candy as they feel they've missed in five or seven years. You scarcified it and made it valuable. Let them gorge. They'll get over it. If you don't let them have it now, they will continue to crave it, sneak it, and pack it in. Make it plentiful, and that will make it less desireable.

Please read all of this: "Economics of Restricting TV Watching of Children." It's by Pam Sorooshian, and will apply to food too.

SandraDodd.com/eating/control
photo by Sandra Dodd, at someone else's house

Make it plentiful

Once someone tried allowing her children to choose their own foods, and after a month she was ready to give up.

It's only been a month. It might take more than that for them to get as much candy as they feel they've missed in five or seven years. You scarcified it and made it valuable. Let them gorge. They'll get over it. If you don't let them have it now, they will continue to crave it, sneak it, and pack it in. Make it plentiful, and that will make it less desireable.

Please read all of this: "Economics of Restricting TV Watching of Children." It's by Pam Sorooshian, and will apply to food too.

SandraDodd.com/eating/control
photo by Sandra Dodd, at someone else's house

Who resists learning?

Pam Sorooshian, on her daughters' experiences in college:

Unschooling seemed to have given them HUGE advantages in college. They were, frankly, shocked at the poor preparation and attitudes of most other students. Other students seemed to them to be "going through the motions," but were not really interested in learning.

It is hard to explain, but all three of my kids and all of their unschooled friends who have gone to college have repeatedly tried to articulate that there seemed to be "something wrong" with so many of the other students and that they seemed actually resistant to learning. The unschooled kids were there because they wanted to be there, first of all. They knew they had a choice and that makes a big difference. A sense of coercion leads to either outright rebellion, passive resistance, or apathy and my kids saw all of those playing out among the majority of their fellow students.

That quote is the middle of something longer that's here: SandraDodd.com/college
The photo is of Roya Sorooshian, and I don't know who took it.

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Notes:
1) Pam Sorooshian has been a college economics professor longer than she has been a mother.
2) "College," in American terminology, is the early years of what is called elsewhere "university." Sorry for the difference in English-speaking-countries' disconnect on this. In the British system, "college" is what would be our last two years of high school, in a way, sort of; sorry.