Should you hire someone to mow your lawn or clean your house? It’s a question of opportunity cost.
Americans are obsessed with doing things ourselves. We clean our houses, assemble our furniture and grill our burgers—even when we’d be better off hiring someone else.
I still mow my lawn and cook most nights for my family, even though I work 80 to 90 hours a week, not counting my side hustle as an unpaid driver and sideline soccer coach for my two daughters. I’m an economist, able to think through these decisions rationally, yet here we are.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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Roland G. Fryer, Jr., a John A. Paulson Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is Professor of Economics at Harvard University, an entrepreneur, and co-founder of Equal Opportunity Ventures.
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