Current Event Topic Directions and Rubric Deadline : Due by the end of Week 2 at

Question

Current Event Topic Directions and Rubric Deadline : Due by the end of Week 2 at 11:59 pm, ET. Directions : Research a current event topic within the past 3 years related to a key principle of economics (from either Chapter 1 or Chapter 2). Create an essay addressing economic principles in a 2 pag e, double - spaced paper. The paper must be in APA format (cover page, one - inch margins, 12 - point text, and Times New Roman font) and attached as a Word document. Please do not copy and paste the document. You must have a reference page with an APA citation of your article. You can use anything from a printed newspaper, online source, or magazine, but you must have a reference for the article (you may attach the article as well, but an APA reference citation will still be necessary). Tip: Use the Virtual Lib rary to search for scholarly resources. This paper is not meant to be a summary of the article. What you need to do is provide a quick overview of the article and how it relates to one or more economic principles. For example, you can find -- and provide y our insight on - - an article addressing the opportunity costs of invested funds. Or you could find an article on the opportunity cost of military spending (take the U.S. involvement in Iraq, for example; the opportunity costs amount to at least 140 billion d ollars’ worth of alternative good and services).

Explanation / Answer

What South Africa will be sacrificing by hosting the Commonwealth Games

The opportunity cost

Known initially as “alternative cost”, this approach to investment decisions was introduced by the Austrian economist and one-time finance minister Friedrich von Wieser.

Closely associated with that often painful truism that “time is money” opportunity cost is the value of the best alternative option or, put differently, the cost of sacrificing alternatives by making a particular economic choice.

By investing in the 2022 Commonwealth Games, the possibility of investing elsewhere in society has been sacrificed. This wider dimension is important because, while the idea of opportunity cost is mostly associated with money, it can be measured across society as a whole.

As South Africa learned from the 2010 FIFA World Cup, staging sporting events requires not only a financial investment but, to succeed, they demand public mobilization. And, surely, as we build towards 2022, South Africans will be called upon to support eThekwini’s Games.

This mobilization, too, can be measured in opportunity cost terms. Instead of mobilizing for the Games, we could direct public energy into concern for climate change, for example.

Economic worry is this: by electing to stage the 2022 Games, what has been sacrificed? More prosaically, what else could we have bought with money and energy we will spend on the Games?

Or, to put a parallel point in the language of the minister for sport, what might be the alternative legacy left both by this investment and the wide-scale public mobilization?

A country mobilized around the national goal of schooling for all – now that will be competition well worth winning – indeed, it may even be one on which economists could agree on!

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