An Economic Discourse upon the Contagion Known as Mexican Swine Influenza

This guest post is by a student in my EEP100 class (background post).
Please praise/critique/comment on its economic quality and importance to you.

---

Writ by the Venerable David of Pon:

Face-masks not seen since the days of SARS are making a fashionable comeback. The new 2009 swine flu season is in.

According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention website, the "2009 H1N1 flu has caused greater disease burden in people younger than 25 years of age than older people." This has been a cause of alarm on university campuses where high densities of people in this vulnerable age group create the ideal conditions for widespread transmission of the virus.

Official campus policy at the University of California, Berkeley dictates that individuals infected with the H1N1 swine flu stay quarantined at home until 24 hours after their fever has subsided. In most cases, this equates to 5-7 days (roughly one week).

What effect might this have on students attending UC Berkeley?

The natural impulse might be to analyze the cost of a week's worth of tuition and run the usual cost/benefit analysis, like so:

As of fall semester 2009, registration, enrollment, and other fees at UC Berkeley amount to $4,108.25 per 16 week semester, excluding mandatory health insurance and a bus pass. Therefore, one week of lecture costs a student about $256.77 in tuition. Obviously, a rational (and cash-strapped) student will never choose to throw away hundreds of dollars, just because of a little pig fever, right?

Maybe not. In many ways, measuring the per week cost of college tuition is beside the point. Beyond a certain withdrawal deadline, tuition is a sunk cost, meaning that once students have paid for a semester's tuition, they cannot get it back. Introductory Economics professors tell their students not to let sunk costs affect their decision making. Why?

Consider the mandatory bus passes Berkeley students pay for. This too is a sunk cost of $68 for each student. But does every student ride the bus, just because every student has a bus pass? Clearly, the answer is no. Even though every student pays for the bus pass, better alternatives exist for many students, whether they are cars or bicycles, vespas or feet. These students aren't wasting money when they decide not to ride the bus; instead, they're being completely rational.

Just as riding the bus when better alternatives exist is illogical, attending lecture when better alternatives exist is also illogical. This is contingent upon the assumption that recovering from sickness is better than attending lecture.

Friends' notes, professors' lecture notes, voice recordings, and webcasts all represent possible substitutes for attending lecture. Though it is debatable how well these substitutes replace an actual lecture, we can still assume that recovering from illness, paired with a substitute method of learning, is the better choice compared to attending lecture.

Not only does attending lecture carry the risk of prolonging illness, it also carries the risk of infecting others. The incalculable social cost of infecting others (I just don't want to do it) is a further disincentive to attend lecture, unless, of course, you happen to be a business major.

Bottom line: Don't attend lecture if you're sick.