There’s good news and bad news.
The good news is obvious – the Western Boulevard Bojangles’ has re-opened after a fire shut it down on May 29. The bad news isn’t apparent until you pull out your wallet.
Prices have gone up.
Sure, the fact that the place caught fire and needed extensive work to repair smoke damage plays a part in the price increase, but it can’t account for everything. The remainder is a reflection of the state of our economy.
Economics is something more college students need to start worrying about. Unfortunately, most of the stuff on television is about balance of trade, financial bubbles, Alt-A mortgages (a mid-risk home loan) and Case-Shiller indexes (a measure of the strength of major housing markets). This jargon makes about as much sense to your average person as quantum mechanics and is a tool for turning important financial information into a black box – most people have no idea how these terms translate into big decisions people face on a daily basis.
But economics is everywhere – it can predict when you’ll cringe about filling your gas tank, complain about the lack of jobs or start angrily ranting about having to pay more money to get slightly smaller portions of food. And there’s plenty of cringing, complaining and angry ranting right now.
In fact, this may have something to do with the apparent spike in crime on campus. One of the first lessons of criminology is that the economic class you are in (e.g., upper-class, blue-collar) is one of the better predictors of index crimes like theft, assault and murder. So instead of constantly complaining about the types of people who join gangs, it might be better to take a look at the broader factors that influence crime. We might want to find ways to fix the economy before getting back to dumping money into a focused anti-gang unit.
Regardless, it all comes back to economics. And the bottom line is that a good number of economic indicators are lousy and show no signs of getting better. It may not be a recession, a slowdown or, as Lewis Black put it, a “war on money,” but it sure feels bad.So given the fact that this is an election year, the economy should be the number one issue on everyone’s mind.
All roads lead to Rome, as the adage goes, and that should be our attitude towards the economy, as all the big issues – the war, global warming, health care and many others – lead to economics.
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