When I was Malc’s age, parents held Chicken Pox/German Measles/whatever...Malcolm may well take after Grandpa Scott and become an economics professor. His latest econ. revelation? Marginal utility. 
In case you need the refresher, marginal utility is the amount of usefulness that each additional unit of consumption brings. The easiest example is food. Well, I like beer better,so I am going to use beer. The first beer I drink on wednesdays is beautiful and brings me much pleasure. It takes me out of my role as caregiver and turns me into a pleasure seeker. The second one I have is even better, because it starts to get me drunk. I like the third one, but less than the others (because I have already had some). This continues until, let say, the tenth one. The tenth one make me throw up and leaves me hung over the next day (this is the concept of diminishing marginal utility that ends in negative utility. You could also proves the rule that I am a tool.) It took many years of college to figure all this out, although I am not sure if I learned it in economics classes (I was an Econ. major too!) or at house parties.
Malcolm is demonstrating mastery of it right now. Today, we went to the ferry building in SF for lunch. I got him a grilled cheese sandwich and it was pretty tasty. I got a salad, and decided to round out the meal by getting some fries. (Upon reflection, I really should not have congratulated myself for getting a salad because bacon, boiled egg, avocado, blue cheese, grilled chicken and ranch dressing are not exactly healthy ingredients.) So, Malcolm was confronted with what to eat for his lunch. The fries were tasty at Taylor’s Refresher, and he wolfed down as many as I was willing to share, which was seven, total. As he progressed through his grilled cheese, he got to the point where he had to ask his belly if he was getting full. The funny thing is that he lifts his shirt and actually asks his belly if it is getting full, and has a different voice for the belly when it answers. So, when his belly was telling him he was getting full, he had to decide what part of the sandwich to eat. I guess he figured that he wasn’t going to finish the whole sandwich, as he is a total string bean, and he started licking the cheese of the bread. As you might guess, American cheese is quite sticky, so he started clawing the cheese off the bread like a sugar starved Oreo addict. When he was done, he left a sad mess of mangled bread behind. I asked him if his marginal utility for eating the sandwich had had reached zero yet, and he looked at me blankly. In his own, unrefined economics jargon, he told me that the marginal utility of the sandwich was less than the utility of riding on the trolley. Luckily he didn’t lick the trolley.
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August 26th, 2009 at 9:43 pm
Wow, I didn't know I still had the capacity to laugh this hard. You win.
February 5th, 2010 at 9:52 am
[...] why I am troubled by Malcolm’s continued trip down the path to mastering economics. Last time, he learned the law of diminishing returns through eating a grilled cheese [...]