As Christmas draws near, store hundreds of children are writing to the big man up North in the hope of receiving their entire Christmas Wish List. In the background of this, no rx their parents have begun the yearly ritual in which they pray that their children ask for something cheap this year. Have no fear parents, purchase future parents or older siblings who have to watch this yearly struggle, the Turbine is here to explain how you can be Santa, as an economist on a budget.
The obvious solution to this problem is to instil a basic understanding of the Factors of Production into your children at a young age. With the knowledge that Santa requires Labour, Capital, Enterprise and Resources to produce at an optimum level, and given his varying demand every year, your child will feel obliged to either volunteer their services as labour each year or, more favourably, they will ask for less in the hope that they will not leave Santa in a position where he can’t meet the increased demand for toys.
Sadly Intro to Microeconomics is not suitable for Primary School Students, so we have a back-up plan. You can use your fantastic IT skills to create a Survey that Santa has sent out, in which the child must rate a list of presents in order of importance, utility or likelihood to break. The child can fill this out and send it to Santa, thus rendering Christmas far easier to manage for all concerned. Sadly after several tests we discovered that this tends to get rid of what little Christmas Spirit existed in a household where such a plan is considered, so we don’t recommend this either.
The Final Turbine Solution is to remove Christmas from the equation entirely. Not only will you not have to worry about presents, decorations and the Tree are eliminated as well. Christmas dinner is gone too and all in all the family will be wealthier. Because as we all know, money is better than happiness. Merry Christmas everyone.
– Andrew Dorman
