Free The Leading Indicators by Gregg Easterbrook Page A

into storage, finding themselves having to pay for not being able to use something. Selling off furniture they couldn’t fit into the townhome did not make financial sense. If Craigslist and the classifieds were any guide, the Vermont cherry armoire Margo spent five thousand dollars on only a few years before—a superb piece—might fetch five hundred dollars now, and that was assuming a buyer could be found. They owned a mahogany dining-room set, a dozen chairs and a table suitable for King Arthur and his knights. Margo wanted big, for the dinner parties she loved to throw. The table did not fit in the townhome dining room, and she couldn’t let it go for a fraction of what it cost. So the table was in storage, along with six of the chairs. At least they still had a dining room. Some of the townhomes in their complex did not, only a breakfast nook. How could one live without a dining room?
    Margo thought about the dreary day she and Tom drove up to the place whose sign announced, SELF-STORAGE. She told Tom that only in America do businesses offer storage of the self, and chuckled at her own joke. Soon she realized the joke was not funny—everyone she glimpsed arriving at or departing from the self-storage facility appeared to be fairly far along into some phase of sadness or personal failure.
    Margo heard a car door outside and then the chirp-chirp of the alarm activating, the modern car being better protected than the modern person. Tom entered, carrying plastic-handle bags with the 7-Eleven logo. He was dressed in a sales-floor clerk’s vest of Restoration Hardware, and wore on his belt a circular clip containing many keys on a retractable lanyard.
    Margo looked at the bags in a disapproving manner. “The grocery store is cheaper,” she said. Yet she should have gone out to pick up a few things—it had been inconsiderate of her to expect Tom to stop on his way home.
    â€œSorry, I’m just tired,” Tom said. “At the grocery store you park like a mile from the door then the inside is so big, you wander. At the new Safeway they have an aisle for domestic water and another entire aisle for imported water. I’m too tired for such a big place after a day on my feet. Seven-Eleven is tempting: just pull up, grab it, get out. They practically push you out. You don’t think about paying too much.”
    â€œâ€˜Too much’ is a matter of point of view,” Lillian said. “Convenience has a cost, like any other commodity or service. Everything comes with a price.”
    In the economics department at her college, statements such as that were not intended to be harsh, merely analytical: “Students, in this class we will discuss the scarcity concept that underlines neoclassical economics. In order for the market to allocate resources efficiently, everything must come with a price.…”
    Even in a utopia, the doctors would earn more than the cabdrivers and command more purchasing power. It is not hard to imagine a society both utopian yet having price-allocation via scarcity, plus significant inequality. Suppose the minimum annual income were $100,000—paid even to janitors and hotel maids—while the maximum annual income rose in steps, based on job value, to $500,000. There would be significant inequality in such a society, and also plenty of incentive to become a surgeon or inventor or pilot, to earn the maximum. The incentive would ensure productivity while rewarding talent, keeping society vibrant. Yet there would be no poverty nor any extreme wealth. Wouldn’t this be utopian? But all that is college talk. For most people, the knowledge that “everything comes with a price” is a lifelong curse.
    Tom put the bags on the counter—eggs, bread, American cheese slices, beer, a discount brand of ground coffee that cost more in 7-Eleven than premium whole bean in a grocery store. The bread was a new variety, whole-wheat white, which